This course will involve a deep look at the comparative political parties and party competition literature. The focus will be on recent work on party types (e.g., mainstream, niche, radical right, populist); party strategies (programmatic, valence, issue emphasis, issue ownership, clientelism); polarization; emergence of "new" constituencies and issues (e.g., ethnic, gender, environmental/nationalist/single issue, LGBT), among other topics. The course will cover theoretical and empirical literature with country cases from around the world. The course will highlight the range of methodological approaches employed in the field, and students will have an opportunity to engage in their own research on these topics; the course culminates in a research paper. This topics course will count as an optional 5th course in the comparative sequence, and will be open to any PhD student and advanced undergraduate, by instructor permission.