Course List

This course looks inside broadly political organizations: government agencies, parties in democracies and dictatorships, and criminal gangs. All must decide what they are for, who belongs, who leads, and how authority and information flow, yet they answer these questions very differently. We begin with government agencies, asking how they develop a sense of mission, how politicians and managers control officials with better information and different goals, and how hierarchies and lines of communication are designed and maintained. We then ask why parties in democracies and semi-democracies differ in their internal rules, how they choose and constrain their leaders, and what membership means. In authoritarian regimes, the party and the state are often one and the same, and the party's internal organization becomes the machinery of government. We also ask how a party that set out to win a revolution or an election evolves once it has to govern. Prison gangs and other criminal organizations pose the most basic question: how can people organize when a powerful state is trying to stop them? Throughout, the focus is on how an organization's environment shapes the way it is built and run, and how it adapts, or fails to, when that environment changes.