Politics affects all of us, whether we realize it or not.  Politics
is the process by which people try to organize their lives
collectively, to create order so that, within reasonable parameters,
we can live our daily lives without crashing into each other every
time our desires, our wills, or our opinions conflict. We rely on
our constitution to provide the basic foundation of order, but that
document provides us in turn with the freedom to disagree on
everything from how to live our private lives, to how much tax
businesses ought to pay.  No wonder politics is a messy business!
If politics is a fact of our lives, we need to understand it.  If we
can't make it go away, we need to know how to make it work.  In this
course, we ask: What makes citizens tick?

How do they make decisions? How do people organize themselves and
express their various interests? How do they decide what role
government ought to play in their lives, and what happens if they
disagree about such fundamental issues? Do people make rational
decisions when they vote? What does it mean to be rational? Does the
democratic process "work"? These are the kinds of questions
political scientists ask about their subjects, and the answers are
not always what we, the subjects, might guess.