PLCP 3110

Honestly, favorite class at UVA. Loved the material, and the professor. Yes, Gerard tended to dive extremely in to certain things that weren't the most relevant or helpful, but he would always get us he material we needed to know one way or another. You'll spend half the semester covering Britain and France, which is unfortunate because you get so little time to do Germany, Italy, and Spain. But there was never a time where I didn't think the material was interesting. It's a ton of work, with tons of reading assigned before every class. You don't have to do all of them, I would just read the first half of a some of them and as long as you got the jist, you're good to go. But when those essays come, sit down, and spend every day you can working on them. Catch up on the readings during that time, and treat that essay like it's everything, because they'll make the difference between B's and A's. If you can develop your argument well and in an organized way, you will get above a B+. But you honestly can't wait until the last minute. Final isn't bad at all, some essays and ID's. TLDR- work super hard on the essays and enjoy this class!

One of my favorite courses taken at UVA, taught by one of my favorite professors. Concerning professors who teach the same course each year, tweaking it each time, this course is perhaps the best-refined course I have taken in my time at UVA. The professor has the course down to a science. He also happens to be one of the best lecturers I have encountered as an undergrad. He spends the first few lectures relaying some basic theory of comparative politics, before engaging in a sequential study of 5 countries in Western Europe, ending the semester with a brief look at the European Union. The five countries studied are: the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Three issues are of interest when studying each country: democratic stability, party systems, and political economy. The professor (somewhat questionably) approaches history scientifically, seeking to gain some explanatory power as regards the varying historical outcomes in post-WWII Western Europe. The professor offers three potential explanations (ideas, interests, institutions) for the three issues at hand. Lectures are rich, straightforward, and fascinating. Discussion section left a bit to be desired. My TA, Olyvia, made the most of what was a relatively undefined meeting requirement. She always solicited our feedback and was open-minded about the activities we might fill our time with. The nature of discussion section ranged from discussion of lecture and the readings to group work to watching first-hand videos on Western European politics. 20% of the course grade came from attendance at and participation in discussion section. The remainder of the course grade was divided between two papers (25% each) and a final exam (30%). The prompts for the papers were straightforward. You were given an issue area (democratic stability, party systems, political economy) and made to explain historical outcomes regarding that issue area using whichever argument (ideas, interests, institutions) made the most sense to you. You could pull examples from any countries that had been studied up to that point. Though the lectures were useful for framing the question at hand, it was essential that you back up your ideas with quotes from the readings. Therefore, it was important to do the readings not only for purposes of discussion section, but also for use when writing the essays. The final exam also had a couple of essays of this sort (though you had to prepare for all essay possibilities, as you did not learn the essay prompts until sitting for the exam, whereas with the take-home essays you had a week after receiving the prompt to write them). The final exam also had a section for IDs, which was pretty straightforward. All in all, the course was extremely interesting and fun, as well as challenging without being difficult. I absolutely would recommend this course to any student with any interest in history or politics.

I would recommend this course, with some caveats.
First of all, Alexander is an excellent lecturer, and the material he presents is fascinating. However, he does tend to repeat himself at times and go on tangents that really are not relevant to the material we were tested on. Also, Alexander would give up to 200 pages of reading for one lecture -- which is excessive and the majority of it never even applied to what we were discussing in lecture.
Secondly, the discussion section for this class was the single most useless discussion section I have ever encountered at my time at the University. My TA (Olyvia) was terrible. Our discussion section included things like watching The Crown and The Iron Lady -- both are excellent programs, so thanks for the Netflix recommendation, Olyvia, but watching them didn't really help improve my grade at all. When I went to her office hours to discuss my first essay, she looked at my outline for 10 seconds and said "looks good" without even reading it. When I asked for clarification about one of my points, only then did she actually take the time to read it and said "ohhhh, yeah. You should definitely rework that entire section." I ended up getting a B+ on the essay, which she told me was an "excellent grade" because Alexander wanted a B- as the average for the class. Previous grade distributions on vagrades.com didn't support that to be true. There were no grades recorded for the entire semester in Collab, and a substantial part of your final grade is participation. Olyvia told us that if we were honest in our self-evaluations that we would get an A (I later found out that she gave me an 89?). I had no clue what my participation grade or final grade breakdown was until after the semester ended, so I emailed Olyvia about it, and she took five days to respond. Conveniently for her, she wanted until the day after final grades were due to reply.
Take the class, but be wary of the fact that your TA controls your entire grade. Make sure to get a good one.

This was a really great course. Professor Alexander made the material really interesting to learn, and our grade was 2 papers, a final, and discussion. I had Daniel as my TA, and he's really knowledgeable. I wouldn't say he's a harsh grader, but he's definitely picky about making sure you write the right things. His discussion sections were quite helpful actually, and complemented lecture. He gave a lot of great advice on the outlines of the paper, and overall was just a great TA. I went to Alexander's OH a couple times, and you can tell he's definitely passionate about the topic. He's a little intimidating, sure, but a fabulous resource if you're ever confused about anything. A lot of reading (which can all be found on Collab) but otherwise a pretty manageable course. One of my favorite classes at UVA so far, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in learning about Europe.

Two 4-page papers, a final exam, and participation. The essays are graded VERY harshly, no matter how much you discuss the prompt or an outline with the professor/TA. Lectures are pretty interesting, although too much time is devoted to certain topics (GB, France) and not enough to others (Spain and Franco). Alexander is an engaging lecturer but the class would be so much better if it was more structured and straightforward. If you are really interested and invested in the topic I would recommend, otherwise I would not recommend it.

This was definitely a worthwhile class. The reading was absolutely insane at times, but reading the material it its entirety wasn't necessary to do well in the course. There were two four-page papers required for the course, as well as a final. The papers were not as bad as people have made them out to be. The prompts typically gave you some freedom in your response, which was nice. You could really manipulate the class readings and lectures to suit your argument, which I enjoyed. My TA, Olyvia, was always very accommodating and willing to meet with me about my paper as well. Expectations for the class were clear, and I did find the lectures rather interesting. However, he would really fly through the powerpoints at lightning speed, so don't even think about copying down a graph from there - you won't make it. The discussion sections were laid back, which was nice because participation in discussion was easy if you had any background on the material and listened in class. I ended up not being able to complete a fair amount of the readings, but still ended up with an A in the course. Definitely would recommend.

This class was a mixed bag. The lectures themselves are very interesting, as Alexander doesn't just read from slides, and makes the lectures story-based. His focus is causal homogeneity and "ideas, interests, and institutions", which are often frustrating to categorize into (but make essays a breeze). The course is pretty easy; 2 essays, a final, and discussion. Alexis Yang was a phenomenal TA, always making study packets for us, and providing good feedback on essays. I recommend slogging through the readings; it can be boring and difficult, but my study guide for the end of the year was gold for the final because of it. Overall, a pretty reasonable and interesting politics course.

TA Hsyuan-Yu was the best and always made discussion exciting. The class itself was very informative and relatively easy in terms of workload. Yet the essays and final were graded harshly and the readings were easily over 100 pages a night. The professor had even curved all the discussion grades downward at the end of semester. Don't take this class if you want to save your GPA.

Whilst this is not an easy course for any extent of the imagination, the Politics of Western Europe is a worthwhile course to take for any prospective politics major. I took this course in the second semester of my first year, and thoroughly enjoyed the way the content was presented in lecture and how the course was structured in order for students that wanted to succeed to succeed. This is not a course for people that want to slack off for a semester, since Professor Alexander doesn't post the lecture slides on Collab and a lot of the material is gathered from what he speaks about during lecture. This makes going to lecture obligatory if you want to succeed in this course. Also, whilst it may seem like a lot of reading, only a few of them are truly essential. Also it is important to note that there isn't any homework, so therefore, your grade is highly dependent on the 2 papers and the final exam.

I really enjoyed this class and I think anyone interested in European politics/history should take it. Professor Alexander doesn't post the lectures online so you HAVE to go to class or at least get the notes from a friend. At first I thought the amount of reading for this class was insane because the syllabus would have about 3 hours of reading after every lecture. However, in my discussion we were each required to sign up to summarize one night of reading and the summaries would be posted on the discussion collab for us to read. This made writing the papers so much easier since you needed 6 sources for a 4 page paper to get full points for the work cited part. Overall I thought this class was very manageable and a B+/A- is attainable as long as you put a lot of time into the papers. Hsuan-Yu Lin was an incredible TA who made us summary charts from the lectures and spent a long time going over the essay prompts so that we didn't write the completely wrong thing since (this was super helpful because Professor Alexander's prompts were basically essays in themselves). Professor Alexander is an incredible lecturer and I am really glad I took this class!