Introduction to Global Politics and Policy

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Global Policy & Politics (GPP) helps students gain an understanding of the influences and challenges officials face during the foreign policymaking process. The course begins by investigating how people's choices are shaped by cognitive, cultural, normative and decision-making structures. The second section of the course examines how a state's attributes (i.e., size, regime type, and internal cohesion) produce different types of constraints on policymakers. The third portion looks at the most important actors in the foreign policymaking process in the United States, including the president, intelligence, the Congress, media, NGOs, international institutions, foreign governments, and lobbyists. In the fourth segment we examine policymaking in a half-dozen countries. Using a comparative approach, we identify the characteristics of each county and study their real-world effects on its foreign policies. The final is an experiential learning simulation in which students apply their skills and knowledge to a crisis situation based on actual events. In addition to studying policymaking, students will also learn how to consume, digest, and organize complex ideas and information across multiple related topics and explain them in a coherent manner. The course both enhances students' knowledge of how foreign policy is made and teaches them the reading, writing and oral communications skills they will need to support, and one day become, a policymaker. This includes producing both written and oral policy briefings as well as collaborative experiential policymaking exercises. The ability to find the logical linkages among arguments and synthesize and present their similarities and differences in concise and informative written and spoken briefings is a highly marketable skill. Multinational corporations, governments, think-tanks, NGOs and international organizations are all seeking people who are able to weigh different policy options and communicate complex analytical ideas to both superiors and subordinates.