Insegnamento a.a. 2024-2025

The State

1.1) what is a state: some theory

1.2) state capacity and governance: measurement

Regimes

2.1) political regimes; democracy and autocracy: some theory and empirical results

2.2) political regimes: measurement issues

2.3) political regimes and economic development

2.4) culture and democracy; on the measurement of "culture"

Democracy

3.1) varieties of democracy: majority control vs proportionate influence

3.2) electoral systems 

3.3) political parties

3.4) measuring ideological positions of parties

Institutions in Democracy

4.1) veto players

4.2) presidential vs parliamentary democracies

4.3) prime ministers and the parliament

4.4) presidents 

4.5) measuring ideological positions of citizens, individual representatives, supreme court justices, etc. 

4.6) common ideological spaces; text analysis of social and legacy media

Special Topics

5.1) accountability and corruption

5.2) federalism

5.3) the politics of the bureacracy

5.4) ethnicity, identity, and non-economic dimensions of conflict

5.5) polarization, inequality, and their measurement
 

At the end of the course students will be able to 

- define concepts such as democracy, autocracy, presidentialism, parliamentary system, proportional representation vs. majority control, and federalism

- understand general "nuts and bolts" of the social sciences like collective action, commitment problems, principal-agent relationships

- explain the main approaches in political science to the study of 

i) state formation, state building, and the bureaucracy

ii) regime types and regime transitions

iii) electoral rules and their relationship to party systems

iv) executives and legislatures 

v) federalism

vi) ethnic, religious, and other social identities

- summarize the empirical approaches used in the social sciences to measure

i) state capacity

ii) regime type and quality of democracy

iii) the "civic culture"

iv) ideological positions of voters, political parties, and other actors, and ideological media bias

v) polarization and inequality 

- deploy the toolbox introduced in the course to, among others,

i) assess whether a given country can be classified as democratic according to the conventional views in political science

ii) provide arguments in favor or against a given institutional reform, e.g., of electoral rules or the rules to select the executive

- examine whether a given proposal to measure an important political concept (e.g., "press freedom") can be considered valid and useful

- propose empirical approaches to measure, in specific contexts, concepts such as ideological polarization, extremism in social media, or ethnic inequality 

• Lectures

Face to face lectures. In the context of the lectures, a significant portion of the time is reserved to general discussion: students are invited, and required, to provide their insights on the materials presented, using critical thinking. In the data- and measurement-oriented sessions, part of the time is reserved for group workshop-style discussions: students, divided in small groups, discuss, criticize, and propose, approaches to measure the political science concepts that are under consideration, and then report to the class plenary some of the ideas they came up with. 

Attendance is mandatory. Attending every lecture ---except special motivated cases--- is a requirement to sit the two non-cumulative partial exams. Non-attending students will have to take the general exam, that covers the entire program.  

Class Participation: 10%

Midterm Exam: 45%

Second Partial Exam: 45%

Non-attending students will have to take the general exam, that covers the entire program.  

Final General Exam: 100%

The main textbook is 

Clark, Golder and Golder, Principles of Comparative Politics, THIRD EDITION, Sage. 

Additional materials, in the form of articles and book chapters, will be specified by the start of the course, and distributed using the digital learning platform.