For most students, arriving at a course of study will involve selection of two focus fields from among the five fields of American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Methodology, and Political Theory. More individualized programs emphasizing either breadth or depth may be developed in consultation with an academic advisor.
Focus Fields of Study
American Politics
Our American Politics program is broad-gauged, with wide coverage of substantive areas and sufficient depth to permit specialization in a variety of areas.
Graduate study in the field of American Politics includes courses in a variety of substantive areas, including Judicial Politics, Political Psychology, Political Behavior, Gender and Politics, Interest Groups, Legislative Politics, Political Parties, Public Opinion, Race and Ethnicity, and Intergovernmental Relations. The field emphasizes rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of American political processes.
Comparative Politics
The Comparative Politics field provides a broad array of thematic and area-specific courses on governments and politics around the world. The Ohio State comparative politics faculty are the U.S. leaders of the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), which focuses on politicization, political communication, and social structure within the context of election campaigns using compatible research designs and common survey questions across two dozen nations. The CNEP is now located at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Graduate students in Comparative Politics have won an array of prestigious grants to support dissertation research around the world, including: Fulbright Hays, Social Science Research Council (IDRF and Pre-dissertation), National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, IREX, Horowitz Foundation, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS).
International Relations
The International Relations (IR) graduate program encompasses a wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches. Our faculty train graduate students and conduct research in international security, international political economy, foreign policy decision making, and international organization using a wide range of tools, including statistics, game theory and historical case studies. This program is designed to give students some flexibility in pursuing their academic goals, while ensuring that all students are exposed to core ideas, debates, and methodological approaches in the field. Majors in International Politics are often complemented by coursework in Comparative Politics, Political Psychology, Political Economy, Political Methodology, and Formal Theory.
Political Methodology
Political Methodology is a fundamental component of modern Political Science. The Ohio State University’s political science field in Political Methodology includes a wide variety of courses and related programs. Specific areas of study include: regression, generalized linear models, causal inference, machine learning, AI tools, experiments, survey/questionnaire design, and time series analysis.
Political Theory
All social-scientific inquiry appeals to concepts and values that are contestable in principle, and often contested in fact. The intelligent conduct of social science therefore requires sustained reflection about the concepts and values that guide our inquiries. This is the role that political theory serves within the discipline of political science. The political theory field encourages disciplinary and methodological pluralism and is open to a wide range of theoretical approaches, including analytical, critical, historical, and interpretive. Faculty encourage graduate students majoring in Political Theory to engage the empirical fields in the discipline, for example by choosing American Politics, Comparative Politics, or International Relations as a second focus or minor field.
Additional Areas of Research Concentration
Political Psychology
The OSU Political Psychology graduate departmental specialization is one of the leading programs in the world. Our program is unique in giving coverage both to citizen political thought and behavior and to elite behavior and international politics. Political psychology explores the role of psychological processes in the unfolding of political behavior, and the impact of political events on psychological processes. The political psychology specialization program provides students with an understanding of how psychological theoretical frameworks can inform political scientists’ understanding of political events, and with expertise in conducting research to further understanding of the nexus between psychological and political phenomena.
Formal Theory
Formal Theory is a vibrant field in the OSU Political Science Department, growing both in size and in breadth of applications. The field of Formal Theory is concerned with the use of mathematics in constructing theories of political phenomena.
Political Economy
Political Economy is a field of true intellectual excitement at OSU. It explores two overlapping areas of inquiry: the interactions between the polity and the economy, and the use of the tools of neo-classical economics to explain how political and economic institutions produce social outcomes by constraining, reflecting, and shaping the behavior of self-interested individuals.
Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
The field of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender explores the constructs of race and gender and the way they influence democratic politics, socio-economic processes, and international relations. Topics like immigration, partisanship, international identity, and social policy, among others, would benefit from a solid theoretical grounding of the concepts of race and gender. This area of specialization aims to provide the theoretical and methodological foundations needed to understand and analyze race, ethnic and gender politics across the sub-fields.