Broadly equivalent to undergraduate study.
How to use this guide
- Read arguments, not just summaries.
- Use cases carefully. Compare items to test explanations, don't just collect facts.
- Learn methods early.
- Write constantly. Short analytical memos are the equivalent of problem sets in STEM.
Part 0: Foundations and Tools
Core Political Concepts
Purpose: the vocabulary of the field.
Learn: power, authority, legitimacy, sovereignty, state, nation, democracy, representation, citizenship, rights, liberty, equality, justice, institutions, interests, ideology, collective action, and public goods.
Primary: Andrew Heywood, Politics.
Alternative: Robert Garner, Peter Ferdinand & Stephanie Lawson, Introduction to Politics.
Research Design
Purpose: how political scientists turn questions into evidence-based arguments.
Learn: concepts, measurement, causation, comparison, case selection, mechanisms, inference, internal/external validity, and scope conditions.
Primary: John Gerring, Social Science Methodology.
Classic: King, Keohane & Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.
Qualitative response: Brady & Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry.
Statistics and Data Analysis
Purpose: reading and producing empirical political science.
Learn: probability, distributions, descriptive statistics, regression, uncertainty, hypothesis testing, model interpretation, and visualization.
Primary: Kellstedt & Whitten, The Fundamentals of Political Science Research.
Applied/data option: Kosuke Imai, Quantitative Social Science.
Use with: R or Python.
Causal Inference
Purpose: understanding whether a political cause actually changes an outcome.
Learn: potential outcomes, experiments, natural experiments, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, matching, and causal diagrams.
Primary: Scott Cunningham, Causal Inference: The Mixtape. More accessible: Angrist & Pischke, Mastering 'Metrics.
Formal Theory and Game Theory
Purpose: modeling strategic political behavior.
Learn: rational choice, collective action, spatial voting, social choice, bargaining, credible commitment, principal-agent problems, and institutional equilibrium.
Primary: Kenneth Shepsle, Analyzing Politics.
Game theory: James Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists, or Dixit, Skeath & Reiley, Games of Strategy.
Part 1: The Core Subfields
Political Theory
Focus: justice, authority, liberty, equality, democracy, rights, law, citizenship, sovereignty, empire, domination, and revolution.
Read first: Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy.
Historical map: Alan Ryan, On Politics, or J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought.
Contemporary theory: Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy.
Primary texts to read directly: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Madison/Hamilton, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Rawls, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Nozick, Okin, Pateman, and contemporary democratic, feminist, postcolonial, critical-race, and environmental theorists.
Learn: how to reconstruct an argument, define a concept, distinguish normative from empirical claims, test if a political principle survives hard cases.
American Politics
Focus: the American state, Constitution, federalism, Congress, presidency, courts, bureaucracy, parties, elections, public opinion, interest groups, race, media, polarization, and policy.
Primary: Kernell et al., The Logic of American Politics.
Alternative: Lowi et al., American Government: Power and Purpose.
Primary sources: the U.S. Constitution, The Federalist Papers, major Supreme Court opinions, party platforms, election data, public-opinion surveys, congressional records, and policy documents.
Learn: how institutions distribute power, how voters, parties, courts, interest groups behave, and how race, class, geography, media, and rules shape political outcomes.
Comparative Politics
Focus: political systems across countries.
Learn: state formation, state capacity, democracy, authoritarianism, parties, electoral systems, constitutions, legislatures, executives, courts, nationalism, identity, revolution, social movements, political violence, development, corruption, welfare states, and regime change.
Primary: Clark, Golder & Golder, Principles of Comparative Politics.
Alternative: Patrick O'Neil, Essentials of Comparative Politics, or Daniele Caramani, Comparative Politics.
Classics/deeper: Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy, Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, Acemoglu & Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Levitsky & Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
Learn: how to compare cases, avoid selection bias, identify mechanisms, and ensure you separate country knowledge from general explanation.
International Relations
Focus: politics beyond the state.
Learn: anarchy, power, war, bargaining, alliances, deterrence, nuclear weapons, civil war, terrorism, international institutions, international law, trade, finance, development, human rights, climate politics, migration, and global governance.
Primary: Frieden, Lake & Schultz, World Politics: Interests, Interactions, Institutions.
Alternative: Mingst, McKibben & Arreguín-Toft, Essentials of International Relations.
Theory classics: Waltz, Man, the State, and War, Keohane, After Hegemony, Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics.
Learn: how different theories explain the same event differently - realism, liberal institutionalism, constructivism, domestic politics, political economy, psychology.
Political Economy and Public Policy
Focus: the relationship between political power and economic outcomes.
Learn: taxation, redistribution, inequality, regulation, public goods, welfare states, trade, finance, development, central banks, firms as political actors, lobbying, bureaucracy, and policy implementation.
Primary: Frieden, Global Capitalism.
Public economics base: Stiglitz & Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector.
Political economy theory: Persson & Tabellini, Political Economics.
Institutions and development: North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail.
Learn: how political institutions shape markets and how economic interests reshape political institutions.
Part 2: Methods in Practice
Qualitative Methods and Case Studies
Learn: process tracing, comparative historical analysis, archival evidence, interviews, case selection, counterfactuals, and mechanism-based explanation.
Primary: George & Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences.
Alternative: Goertz & Mahoney, A Tale of Two Cultures.
Use with: one focused case and one comparison set.
Survey Research and Public Opinion
Learn: sampling, question wording, measurement error, survey experiments, turnout, ideology, polarization, opinion formation.
Primary: Erikson & Tedin, American Public Opinion.
Data sources: ANES, GSS, Pew Research Center, Eurobarometer, World Values Survey.
Experiments
Learn: lab experiments, field experiments, survey experiments, randomization, treatment effects, spillovers, ethics, external validity.
Primary: Druckman et al., Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science.
Use with: publications in political behavior, comparative politics, or development.
Text, Media, and Computational Politics
Learn: content analysis, topic modeling, ideology measurement, social media data, campaign communication, misinformation, network analysis, ethical limits of political data.
Primary: Grimmer, Roberts & Stewart, Text as Data.
Use with: congressional speeches, manifestos, party platforms, news articles, or social media datasets.
Part 3: Advanced Areas
Democracy and Authoritarianism
Learn: democratization, democratic backsliding, authoritarian institutions, repression, elections under autocracy, coups, civil-military relations, opposition strategy.
Start with: Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Levitsky & Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
Constitutional Law, Courts, and Legal Politics
Learn: judicial review, constitutional interpretation, rights, separation of powers, courts as political institutions, judicial behavior, legal mobilization.
Start with: Epstein & Knight, The Choices Justices Make, Whittington, Kelemen & Caldeira, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics.
Parties, Elections, and Political Behavior
Learn: voting, representation, partisanship, ideology, polarization, campaign effects, turnout, coalition building.
Start with: Campbell et al., The American Voter, Achen & Bartels, Democracy for Realists, Aldrich, Why Parties?.
Race, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity
Learn: identity formation, ethnic conflict, racialization, nationalism, representation, colonial legacies, citizenship, migration, minority politics.
Start with: Anderson, Imagined Communities, Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Dawson, Behind the Mule, Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making.
Political Communication and Media
Learn: agenda setting, framing, persuasion, propaganda, media systems, misinformation, campaigns, public opinion, digital platforms.
Start with: Iyengar, Media Politics, Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Bennett & Livingston, The Disinformation Age.
Security Studies
Learn: war, coercion, deterrence, civil war, insurgency, terrorism, nuclear strategy, intelligence, military organizations, security institutions.
Start with: Schelling, Arms and Influence, Fearon papers on war as bargaining failure, Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
Regional Politics
Learn: one region deeply enough to avoid abstract theorizing without context.
Choose one region. Then read a regional survey, then compare two or three countries through a single question: democratization, state capacity, parties, violence, development, religion, ethnicity, or foreign policy.
Political Thought Beyond the Standard Canon
Learn: feminist theory, Black political thought, postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Islamic political thought, Chinese political thought, indigenous political thought, environmental political theory.
Start with: Mills, The Racial Contract, Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Said, Orientalism, Arendt, The Human Condition, Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism.
Part 4: Reading Scholarship
Journals to sample
Read review essays first, then research articles.
General: American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Annual Review of Political Science.
Comparative: World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics.
International Relations: International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics.
Theory: Political Theory, American Political Thought, History of Political Thought.
Policy/public administration: Journal of Public Policy, Governance, Public Administration Review.
How to read a political science paper
For each paper, write down:
- The question
- The dependent variable
- The independent variable or mechanism (what's doing the explaining).
- Related theory
- Evidence: cases, data, texts, interviews, archival sources, experiments, models
- The identification strategy or inferential logic
- The strongest objection.
- Scope (where the claim should and should not apply)
- One better test of the argument
Practice work
- Write a short theory memo. Define a concept and defend one position.
- Write a case memo. Explain one event using two competing theories.
- Build a comparison table across countries or institutions.
- Replicate one simple chart from a political science paper.
- Analyze one public dataset i.e., elections, public opinion, conflicts, legislative votes, trade, or state capacity.
- Track one ongoing issue through academic papers, policy reports, and primary sources.
Suggested Order
- Core political concepts + one introductory overview.
- Political Theory: read a guide, then primary texts directly.
- American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations as the three empirical cores.
- Statistics and research design.
- One deeper methods track: qualitative/case studies, quantitative/causal inference, formal theory, surveys, experiments, or text/data.
- Political Economy and Public Policy.
- Choose one primary subfield and one secondary subfield.
- Read review articles, then current journal articles.
- Keep writing memos and doing small empirical or case-based projects.