Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science- Law, Politics and Society

LAW. POLITICS & SOCIETY is the study of the relationship between law, politics, and society. At UMass Amherst, we are interdisciplinary. In addition to gaining knowledge of the key debates in the field from a political science perspective, our faculty incorporate a wide range of approaches into their research and teaching, including those from anthropology, computational social science, criminology, economics, gender studies, history, law, linguistics, sociology, and technology.
We are both domestic and global in scope. Faculty study core questions at the local, state, national, and international levels. This includes addressing questions central to the role of courts in American democracy, how formal and informal legal systems operate throughout the world, and the role that law plays on the international stage.
And we are methodologically pluralistic, with faculty whose work embraces qualitative and quantitative approaches, including case studies, content analysis, ethnography, experimental survey methods, field research, interpretive research, network analysis, quantitative modeling, and textual analysis. Several of us are faculty affiliates with the Computational Social Science Institute.
The Department's approach to the discipline of political science is consciously eclectic, based on an assumption that the study of politics cannot be reduced to any one theory or a single set of methods. Mutual appreciation among faculty members with diverse interests and approaches characterizes the intellectual atmosphere of the Department. With more than 30 faculty members, the department covers a wide array of methodologies and research interests, including the study of theory, institutions, political behavior, and political development. UMass-Amherst offers PhD and accelerated MA degrees in six fields of political inquiry: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Law. In addition, while each field is its own thriving research community, your studies can involve multiple research clusters whose work crosses subfields, including Conflict, Violence and Security, Political Economy, Global Forces, Computational Social Science, and Ambiguities of Democracy. Youll also choose methods training appropriate to the questions you are askingfrom statistical modeling and network analysis to ethnography and textual analysisand enjoy mentorship by scholars often across diverse subfields and methodological orientations.