Institutional Roots of Race and Inequali

This course is about the relationship between two complex and nebulous phenomena in the world: race and institutions.

Race and race-like concepts have been deployed for centuries (at least), often with the purpose of justifying economic, social, or political inequality. The study of Race and Ethnic Politics is well-established in political science, but the majority of this research draws on methods and theories from psychology or public opinion research, which are not generally designed to study
institutions or their effects. But if we accept that race is a social construction, it is largely composed of institutions: formal rules governing what one person may do to another that invoke
"racial identities," informal norms about interpersonal interactions, and the mental habits, attitudes, and beliefs that have developed around them.

The purpose of the course is to explore the implications of defining race as primarily a set of institutions for our understanding of politics. In particular, the course is designed to present repeated exercises in two kinds of analysis: first, assessing what published research (mainly in political science) can tell us about the world, and second, what methods or questions might have
been better suited to illuminate the phenomena that the researchers are interested in.

The course does not have pre-requisites, but readings will involve a variety of political science methods, including experiments, statistical analysis, and game theory. If not already familiar with these methods students are expected to engage thoughtfully with arguments relying on them.