The program in Politics seeks to induct students into the community of liberally educated indi-viduals who are capable of understanding government and politics in terms of the theories, concepts, and tools of sophisticated political analysis which characterize the discipline of political science. Our goal, therefore, is not to train professional political scientists, but rather to produce the liberally educated citizen who is fluent in the language of politics and political analysis and thereby has a foundation for both citizenship in a democratic society and successful training in a job, in a gradu-ate school, or in a professional school. These two regime types differ in the emphasis they place on the questions of command, consent, interests and rights in societies.
Authoritarian rule is the oldest and most common form of government known to history.
Since the 1990s, however, the prevalence of authoritarian governments has declined, and many countries are becoming more democratic. It is too soon to know if this trend will last as earlier movements toward democracy have faced reversals, and democracy is often hard to maintain. We will study these questions by looking at the theories of different regime types, and we will also look at how these theories manifest themselves in some specific countries around the world. We will discuss two major theories about democracies which have shed some light on these questions. One theory has suggested that the creation of stable democracies is linked to the type of political culture found in these countries.