How you should study politics

Politics (and international relations) is one of the enduringly popular humanities majors for Arts students at the ANU. Yet the way many students go about filling up their 7 subjects leaves them largely unqualified for anything and knowledgeable about only a handful of topical global trends. To avoid finding yourself unskilled and ignorant at the end of your degree, you might consider the following suggestions.

There are, broadly speaking, three types of courses that you can study in politics at ANU—political science courses, political theory courses and case study courses.

Political science emphasises formal modelling and empirical methodologies, especially statistics. Topics include game theory (things like bargaining and escalation models), voting patterns and institutional design. As the name implies, political science is non-normative and is principally concerned with trying to discern how things actually are and, on the basis of that knowledge, predict future outcomes. ANU had almost no political science courses until recently—now is a great time to test the waters.

Political theory tends to be more normative, and is concerned with ideas in politics. A clear example is the course I once tutored, Foundations of Political Theory, which went from Plato and Aristotle through to Machiavelli via the Romans and Christians. The objective of such courses is to provide students with some historical perspective on the development of political thought, and equip them with the ability to analyse and critique political notions like liberalism, totalitarianism and the veil of ignorance from a priori positions.

Finally, case study courses look in depth at a particular subject that is currently trending, like nuclear politics, the Middle East or refugees. The best ones try to apply tools and perspectives from political theory and science to unpack these case studies.

Don’t do many case study courses (2 is plenty). Also try to avoid doing case study courses until you have done a substantial number of theory and science courses, especially the foundational ones like public choice, game theory, foundations of political theory and ideas in politics (i.e. the history of liberalism).

Why? Because theory and science courses give you the tools you need to conduct an analysis, while case study courses just give you something to analyse. If you don’t have tools when you take case study courses you will instead apply your prejudices and come out the back of your degree no smarter, wiser or deeper than you went in. That seems like a waste of $20 000.

Another reason to avoid case studies is that they are extremely specific and you will thus rarely have an opportunity to apply what you learn therein in your life. How many of you will actually go on to work in nuclear politics? What about the Middle East? If you don’t end up in one of these areas then all your specialist knowledge will be redundant and you will find that you have very little to bring to the table. Not only are employers going to be hard pressed to consider you useful, but you yourself will have little that you can apply to understand the world as it changes over the coming decades.

Even if you did find yourself working in these areas, you would be best served in both endeavours by having a solid grounding in bargaining games and the brinkmanship strategy, human rights theory and the psycho-dynamics of revenge. You won’t learn about any of that outside of theory and science courses.

The main reason people avoid political science courses is that they fear the math. This is understandable, but the world is moving inexorably towards formal models and empiricism. This is driven largely by the power of facts over theory in public debate, and by the fact that we have centuries of theory that we are only just now being able to test with data. These trends will only accelerate. You are better off learning these techniques at the relatively easy undergraduate level than having to come back later in life when you are burdened with more pressures and less time. Critically, these are skills that will increasingly be in demand by employers. There must be some extent to which you came to university to get skills. 

The easiest way to waste your arts degree is to spend 3 years applying your prejudices to new topics and become ever more confirmed in your biases. If you enrol almost exclusively in case study courses, there form cliques with like minded individuals and debate with other cliques along well-worn lines of political debate you won’t learn very much at all. Find the courses that provide tools and analytical lenses and stick to those. There will be plenty of time to wage ideological war in life and postgraduate studies.

A shorter version of this article was originally published by Woroni.