Political Science M.A.

The M.A. program requires 30 credits of graduate-level work. The Department offers course work in the following fields:

• Political Philosophy (classical, modern, contemporary, and American thought, as well as additional specialized subjects).
• American Politics (Congress and the presidency; constitutional law; political parties, interest groups, and voting behavior; urban politics; politics of race, ethnicity, and gender; public policy; and political economy).
• Comparative Politics (political economy, development, public policy, nationalism, and democratization; area specializations include Western Europe, East and South Asia, Russia and Eastern Europe, Latin America; on an occasional basis, the Middle East and Africa).
• International Politics (international relations, organizations, law, and human rights; international political economy; globalism and crime; national and international security; nationalism; and foreign policies of countries and regions listed above).

Students are required to take two types of graduate seminars – core seminars and research seminars – although students also have ability to take upper level undergraduate courses in the Department of Political Science for graduate credit, "cognate" courses outside the department, and independent study courses designed by student and the supervising professor.

Of the 30 credits counted toward the M.A. degree, 9 can come from outside the Department of Political Science. These "cognate" courses allow students to pursue topics related to their field of study in other disciplines through courses taught by other departments at Marquette University. Our M.A. students can also take a limited number of upper-level undergraduate courses on topics of particular interest to them. The student and professor agree on an additional set of requirements for the course in that case, and the credits count toward the 30 required for the M.A. degree.