Why Wisconsin?

If you are considering graduate work in Political Science, you probably already know that many universities have Ph.D. programs in Political Science. Our graduate program has a number of features that we believe make it one of the most attractive in the country.

Our Department is one of the most highly rated Political Science departments in the United States. A UW-Madison Ph.D. is a qualification that has high standing, an important advantage when you look for a job.

Our Department is also large and intellectually diverse. We have faculty who apply the most sophisticated state-of-the-art statistical methods to models of political behavior and we have faculty who produce subtle and finely nuanced qualitative studies of political culture. There is, however, a tradition among the faculty of collegiality, of respecting each others' approaches to the study of politics. This atmosphere of tolerance for a wide range of epistemologies and methodologies sets the tone for productive graduate study here.

The intellectual diversity of our department is matched by the variety of topics we cover in our courses.

• The comparative politics courses we offer cover a wide variety of countries and stress important themes such democratization and legacies of authoritarianism, political economy, political culture, violence, institutions, and political change in developing countries.
• Our faculty in International Relations, including International Political Economy, provide advanced training in analyzing global problems such as arms control, international relations theory, international organizations and trade.
• Our American politics group contains scholars with national reputations specializing in the major institutions such as the courts, Congress and the Presidency. We also have a very strong political behavior group with expertise in elections and voting, public opinion, political psychology and media and politics.
• Our statistical methods sequence provides state-of-the-art training in political methodology, including course work in maximum likelihood methods, time series, and Bayesian statistics. We also offer courses in qualitative methods, a topic ignored by many departments.
• The theory field includes faculty who teach and publish on both political theory and other topics such as public policy and political behavior. The theory group spans a broad historical range that includes ancient political theory, early modern political philosophy, and modern and post-modern political thought.

Our faculty biographical sketches will give you the specifics on individual faculty members, which include current and former presidents of our professional associations, editors of leading journals, and principal investigators on some of the discipline's large-scale data collection projects.

In brief, you can obtain high quality training at Wisconsin in both a wide variety of subjects within political science and a wide variety of approaches to studying them. For new graduate students this is a decided advantage since many incoming students do not know the precise area of specialization that they will want to pursue. Unlike many departments, a Wisconsin degree does not commit you in advance to a particular specialization or methodological approach. The department has an active set of research workshops in a variety of fields that allow for frequent interaction among faculty and graduate students. As evidence of the quality of our graduate training, the department ranks in the top five for APSA dissertation award winners over the past decade.

The large size of our faculty also allows us to give graduate students more individual attention than is possible in programs with a more limited faculty size. With 38 faculty and entering classes of graduate students that range roughly from only 14 to 20, we have one of the best student-faculty ratios in the country. This kind of personal attention is essential for students whose interests do not fall into the neat boundaries of traditional course offerings. Our faculty members are accessible to students and the department strives for an informal and friendly atmosphere. This goal is aided by a supportive community of graduate students who maintain a cooperative environment that is conducive to teaching and learning from one another.

Our graduate program is also strengthened by the presence on campus of faculty in other departments with skills of value to our students. Many social science and humanities departments on our campus are ranked at or near the top of their disciplines. The faculty of other Departments and their graduate students contribute to the attractiveness of being a graduate student here. Political Science students regularly take courses with faculty from Departments such as History, Economics, Law, Statistics, and Sociology. Students in Comparative Politics find useful resources in the many nationally-ranked area studies centers. The strong interdisciplinary emphasis among political science faculty and across the university as a whole provide an array of exciting speakers on a wide range of topics to enrich the intellectual environment on campus.