Associate Professor
U.C. Berkeley, 1989

Homepage

Office: 4351 Bunche Hall
Phone: (310) 206-5228
Fax: (310) 825-0778
E-mail: randerso@ucla.edu

Mailing Address:
UCLA Department of Political Science
4289 Bunche Hall
Box 951472
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472

Curriculum Vitae

Class Websites

Field:

Comparative Politics

Research Interests:

Notes:
Dick Anderson trained as a specialist on Soviet politics and foreign policy.  With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, his interests shifted to the study of moves toward democracy, and, noticing how shifts in discourse seemed to push along the transition from Soviet dictatorship to Russian elections, he began studying linguistics.  He teaches a graduate seminar on discourse analysis and an undergraduate seminar on political language, and he is developing a new undergraduate course comparing discourse in undemocratic polities throughout history and around the world with the discourse of democracies.  He also teaches Russian politics, introduction to world politics,  analytic approaches to comparative politics, and a course on politics in Western Europe offered as part of an annual summer overseas program offered by UCLA in Europe.  He is the author of Public Politics in an Authoritarian State, a study published by Cornell University Press that shows how campaigning for political office in a non-electoral setting shaped Soviet foreign policy, and co-author of a joint volume, Post-Communism and the Theory of Democracy, published by Princeton University Press, in which four specialists on the USSR address the lessons about democracy to be learned from post-Soviet politics.  He is now completing a large project investigating whether the discursive shifts documented in his publications on the transition from Soviet dictatorship to Russian democracy in the 1990s reproduce patterns of discourse encountered around the world and throughout history in other polities.

Selected Publications:

For a current list of publications please click here.