Courses

Political Science Courses

Pol S 501X Quantitative Methods for Research Managers
Introduction to the quantitative analytical methods commonly used in public management and policy analysis. This course covers topics such as descriptive statistics, probabilities, inferential statistics, analysis of nominal and ordinal data, and regression analysis.

Pol S 510 State Government and Politics
Comparative analysis of state political systems. Role of interest groups, political parties, legislatures, courts, and governors in state politics. Possible determinants of public policy outputs at the state level.

Pol S 513 Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
Theories and practices of the American federal system. Politics and policy making among federal, state, and local governments.

Pol S 532 Managing IT in the Public Sector
Overview of information technology management in public organizations. Topics include the usage of information technology in government, its impact on organizational behavior and the government-society relationship, issues related to information technology project management, and related organizational and ethical issues.

Pol S 533 E-Government and Information Policy

Pol S 534 Information & Security Management
Course covers the managerial, legal, political, and ethical issues related to information security management. Topics include the constitutional and legal framework of information security, organizational policies and practices in information security management, and related political and ethical issues.

Pol S 540X Public Service Practicum
This course is composed of five, three hour Saturday sessions. Several sessions are offered each semester and students are able to choose which sessions they would like to attend based on their interests. The five sessions do not need to be completed within the same semester but can be attended throughout the year. These sessions include tours of local facilities and guest speakers.

Pol S 544 Comparative Public Policy
Examines how, why, and to what effect governments deal with substantive policy problems differently. Environmental factors, ideologies, cultures, domestic policy making processes, and interest groups.

Pol S 546X Public Service Leadership
Examine theories of leadership and best management practices selected from public sector organizations. Appreciate the difficult challenges today’s public managers face and hone your skills to lead, particularly the street-level bureaucracy by studying focused literature, case studies, and class workshops.

Pol S 547 Political Leadership and Elites
Various forms of leadership and leader-follower relations. Obligations, exchanges, incentives, coercion, corruption, bossism in both the U.S. and foreign experience.

Pol S 561 The Chief Executive
Legal and political forces influencing the U.S. president, governors, and other governmental executives in decision making, developing and administering programs of government, leading public opinion, and influencing legislation.

Pol S 570 Politics and Management of Nonprofit Organizations
Overview of issues concerning nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Roles nonprofit organizations play in society and United States' legal requirements and restrictions for tax-exempt organizations.

Pol S 571 Organizational Theory
Seeks an understanding and explanation of the behavior of complex public organizations; examines the intellectual tradition of American public administration, organizational theory, and public management applications.

Pol S 572 Public Budgeting & Financing
Introduces basic concepts in public finance, basics of public financial statement analysis, process and formats of budgetary systems, budgetary politics and strategies, management of revenues and expenditures, and other issues of public financial management.

Pol S 573 Public Personnel Management
Focuses on historical evolution of the U.S. civil service system, the human resources (HR) manager's legal environment, equal employment opportunity, affirmative action, and workplace diversity, sexual harassment and employer liability, HR planning in an information age, classification, job evaluation, and the pay structure, hiring the right person, discipline and job termination, performance evaluation and continuing education, and labor relations and collective bargaining.

Pol S 574 Policy Analysis and Evaluation
Focuses on integration, application, utilization of public administration and public policy concepts in the evaluation of results and effectiveness of public programs.

Pol S 575 Management in the Public Sector
Literature and research on organizational behavior and management. Theory with emphasis on applied aspects of managing contemporary public sector organizations. Topics include distinctions between public and private organizations, leadership, productivity, employee motivation, organizational structure, and organizational change.

Pol S 576 Administrative Law
Constitutional problems of delegation of governmental powers, elements of fair administrative procedures, judicial control over administrative determinations

Pol S 577 Government, Business, and Society
Diverse perspectives on the changing roles and relationships of business, government and society so as to open the way for more effective policy decisions on corporate-government affairs. Topics may include the changing economy; transformation of workplace and community conditions; consumerism; social responsibilities of businesses; economic policies and regulations; and politics in the business-government relationship.

Pol S 579/579c Spreadsheet Modeling

Pol S 580 Ethics and Public Policy
Major ethical concepts in U.S. political philosophy. The controversy over public versus private morality in political policy making. Analysis of public decision-making case studies, emphasis on ethical considerations. Major proposals and legislation related to improving the quality of ethical criteria and decisions in public policy making.

Pol S 581 International Political Economy
An overview of the international political economy since the end of World War II. Special emphasis on national (primarily U.S.) development assistance and agricultural/food politics and policies, and those of the international food organizations, the World Bank, and the regional development banks.

Pol S 582 Environmental Politics and Policies
Major ideologies relating to conservation and ecology. Processes, participants, and institutions involved in state, national, and global environmental policymaking. Case studies of environmental controversies and proposals for policy reform.

Pol S 583X Public Management and Law

Pol S 585X Comparative & International Administration
Comparison of national bureaucratic systems in major world regions, role of national and local bureaucrats under regime change, democratization, and globalization; skills needed to lead international development projects, education and training for international public administrators.

Pol S 586 Science, Technology and Public Policy
Investigates the dynamics of interaction between science and politics at the national and international level and how this interaction shapes policy for science, human welfare, and global concerns. The topics include the evolutionary relationship between science and government; the old and new social contract for science; national innovation policy; and global economic and environmental concerns.
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Selected Courses in Other Departments

MIS 535 Telecommunications Management
Issues involved in the management of telecommunications function. Overview of communications technology used in various business applications, local area network, wide area network, broad band network, wireless and voice networks. Internet technologies and protocols. Analyzing the strategic impact of these technologies on organizations. Strategic planning for telecommunications, including network planning and analysis.

MIS 538 Business Processes and System Development
Discusses the theory and techniques used to analyze information systems to support various business processes. The course also discusses the theory and concepts related to business systems design such as data and process modeling, relational data base theory, database management, systems design, and developing technical specifications for a business system. A working prototype for a business application will be developed using popular software development packages.

ComS 554 Distributed Operating Systems
Laboratory course dealing with practical issues of design and implementation of distributed and network operating systems and distributed computing environments (DCE). The client server paradigm, inter-processes communications, layered communication protocols, synchronization and concurrency control, and distributed file systems. Graduate credit requires additional in-depth study of advanced operating systems. Written reports.

IE 581X E-Commerce Systems
Design, analysis, and implementation of e-commerce systems. Information infrastructure, enterprise models, enterprise processes, enterprise views. Data structures and algorithms used in e-commerce systems. SQL, exchange protocols, client/server model, web-based views.