This page contains materials for instructors teaching from Political Economy for Public Policy (Princeton University Press). Below you’ll find editable Beamer/LaTeX files (please excuse my hacky code) and PDFs for both presentation (i.e., with reveals) and handouts (i.e., without reveals). For each lecture, there is also a zip file with all the figures I used as PDFs. Put those figures in a directory called “figures” inside the directory containing the LaTeX file in. The whole course can be taught with no calculus, if that is more appropriate for your students. Where relevant, I’m including lecture notes both with and without calculus. 

I am also posting materials for some activities I do in class. For each activity, I’ve included detailed instructions, as well as any materials that I use.

I have now also added video lectures with interspersed quizzes for many of the topics (I haven’t done all the governance dilemmas, but don’t give up as you scroll down because there are videos and quizzes for the selectorate model and foreign aid). The video lectures are done without any calculus and correspond to the topics covered in the second syllabus below. 

Here are three syllabi I’ve used for the course. The first reflects my traditional approach, where additional readings are used to provide an alternative take on the same content. The second reflects a version of the course done with asynchronous lectures and no calculus. The third is the most recent version of the course I’ve been teaching, no calculus but covering more material than in the asynchronous version we taught during the pandemic. Because I teach on the quarter system, I don’t cover every chapter of the book in my syllabi. 

Original Syllabus

Asynchronous Syllabus

Most Recent Syllabus

Over the years, I’ve grown a little dissatisfied with Chapters 1 and 3 of this book. Chapter 1 does too much ethics and too little political theory. Chapter 3 frames Pareto concepts in a way that isn’t quite in keeping with the way I now think about it. So I’ve been working on a new chapter that takes the place of these in the current version of the class I teach, which I’m posting here. There are associated lectures slides available below. I welcome comments.  

New Normative Frameworks Chapter