84-609 American Political Divides and Great Debates

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

Are Americans really so divided? The question sounds rhetorical, but political scientists have spent thirty years disagreeing about the answer, and the first month of this course works through that argument: whether the public has genuinely polarized or merely sorted itself into tidier parties, what people mean by "affective polarization" and whether it does the damage commonly attributed to it, how race and partisanship reinforce one another, and whether any of this actually threatens democracy. You will read scholars arguing with each other in print, sometimes over the same data. The rest of the semester belongs to you. Working in teams of four or five, you will choose a topic, assign your classmates the readings, set the questions, and run the discussion yourselves. Alongside that you will write an op-ed for a general audience, review a book and present it to the class, and build a policy brief with a small team. Running through all of it is a question about justice: how political division creates and entrenches inequality — who gets heard, who gets represented, and who absorbs the costs of a politics organized around mutual dislike. No previous coursework in political science is expected, and no statistics beyond reading a chart.

Prerequisites: none listed

Offered: Fall 2026, Fall 2025

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