The Faculty
The Department of Political Science was founded in 1974 and currently has 40 faculty members and 9 adjunct faculty who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds, methodologies, and approaches.  Ours is a young department and yet it has skyrocketed to prominence among political science departments in the United States. The most recent National Academy of Sciences study ranks us among the top ten graduate programs in political science in the country. 

When asked to identify the most important qualities of our program, we come up with a list of characteristics that make UCSD's department an unusually congenial place to be, for faculty and students alike. Members of our department are bound together by our commitment to theoretically informed research; our individual projects may be empirical case studies, philosophical investigations, or formal theory, but they all contribute to the major theoretical developments in the discipline.  In addition, we value the collegial community of scholarship in which intellectual differences are not battle lines, but points of fruitful exchange, the informal environment in which faculty and graduate students can easily involve themselves in each other's research, and in which opportunities for independent work are made available to undergraduates; and the devotion to excellence in teaching.

Graduate Program
Consistent with our NAS rating, the most recent US News and World Report survey ranks our graduate program as 7th in the nation. The department also ranked 1st in the nation in overall graduate student satisfaction in the recent NAGPS National Doctoral Program Survey. We believe we have built a program in which our graduate students benefit from and contribute to the intellectual vitality of the department not only in their dissertation research, but also through their work with faculty on collaborative research projects. 

Our doctoral program encompasses four broad sub-fields: American politics, comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. The department and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies also offer a joint PhD which builds on the considerable strengths that each unit currently possesses and offers a distinct focus. The department enrolls approximately 12-18 new graduate students each fall, and we currently have over 60 in residence.  

Graduate placements include appointments at leading government agencies and research institutions and assistant professorships at California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Duke University, Harvard University, Notre Dame, UCLA, University of Minnesota, SUNY, and other prestigious universities.

Undergraduate Program
Political Science is the sixth largest concentration on campus, with over nine percent of UCSD students graduating from our department. Our department offers  a general political science major along with six areas of concentration - American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, public law, and public policy - and two minors. In recent years, many of our students have been admitted to leading graduate programs in political science, international business, and law.

The heart of the UCSD campus belongs to its six undergraduate colleges - Eleanor Roosevelt, Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, John Muir, Revelle and our newest college, Sixth. Our college system combines the friendly intimacy of a small campus with the academic advantages of a major research university. Each of these colleges has a unique educational philosophy and different graduation requirements. Each faculty member is formally affiliated with one of these colleges. Departmental courses are open to students of all colleges and we have a single set of major requirements.

Departmental Activities
There are currently a number of active speaker series and ongoing research projects in the department including the Project on International Affairs, American Politics and Institutions Project, Political Theory Colloquium , Political Science Experimental Lab, Comparative Politics Speaker Series, the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project, and the Political Economy Lunch Group.  The department is also affiliated with a number of important research centers, including the Center for US-Mexican Studies, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, UCSD Civic Collaborative, and Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.

Campus and Locale
UCSD has approximately 16,500 undergraduate and 2,600 graduate students. It is a fairly new campus, having admitted its first undergraduates in 1964. In the relatively brief period since the founding of the general campus, UCSD has developed into one of the country's leading research universities. The National Research Council ranks UCSD 10th in the nation in the quality of its faculty and graduate programs.  UCSD is the only institution founded in this century to receive a top-ten ranking, and one of only two public universities in the top ten.  Our faculty of roughly 1,400 currently includes five Nobel Laureates, ranks seventh in the country in the number of National Academy of Science members, and has one of the nation's highest percentages of faculty elected to the prestigious national academies. The campus also typically ranks among the top five universities in the country in research funding. 

UCSD occupies a 1,300 acre wooded site on the La Jolla bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Mexico is 20 miles to the south, and Los Angeles is 120 miles to the north. There are hiking and camping opportunities in nearby mountains and deserts. The San Jacinto mountains, rising to 11,000 feet, are two hours drive to the northeast. The Laguna mountains, rising to more than 6,000 feet, are a one hour drive to the east. Beyond the Lagunas lie the Anza-Borrego Desert and the Salton Sea. The San Diego metropolitan area has about 2.5 million inhabitants and provides ample urban amenities. The climate is perhaps the most mild in the United States, year-round. In July the mean high temperature is 77 and in January it is 65.

Library and Computer Resources
The research facilities available to students and faculty in the department are excellent. The University Libraries house over 2.6 million volumes, subscribe  to over 26,000 serials in print and/or electronic format, and is an official depository of government documents. Books and journals not in UCSD's collections may be requested (electronically, if so desired) from any of the other University of California libraries or from other university libraries around the country. The University Libraries also provide on-campus and remote online access to numerous reference indexes and data collections.  UCSD is also home to the impressive Lijphart Elections Archive.

The Political Science Department shares access to the Social Sciences Computer Center's leading edge HP-9000 K-class Unix server, which is available via telnet from anywhere in the world. The SSCC maintains an extensive selection of statistical and econometric packages in addition to standard language and math routines. In addition, the SSCC hosts the social science database, which contains the major census, financial, and survey data sets. All computers are networked with the leading edge UCSD campus backbone that provides high-speed access to the Internet as well as ultra-high speed access to other leading edge university and research institutions via the Internet II.  In cases where these tools are insufficient to fulfill the needs of a graduate student or faculty members, the San Diego Supercomputer Center is just yards away.