Insegnamento a.a. 2026-2027

• Political institutions and economic outcomes: democracy, institutional persistence and public resource allocation.
• Political actors: parties, politicians, electoral accountability, political participation and voter persuasion.
• Political preferences: measurement and the influence of information, experience and education.
• Polarization and populism: economic and political determinants.
• Media: political slant, persuasion, social media and censorship.
• Organized interests and climate policy: lobbying, political influence and responses to climate change.
• Empirical research in political economy: experiments and quasi-experimental designs, identification assumptions, interpretation of results and the verification of AI-assisted research claims.

• K1. Explain how institutions, political incentives and information influence political behavior and economic policy.
• K2. Describe the empirical strategies used in political economy research and explain the assumptions required for causal interpretation.

• A1. Critically evaluate empirical papers and research claims, including AI-generated claims, by checking sources, identification assumptions and alternative explanations.
• A2. Formulate a research question and develop a feasible empirical design, specifying data, the source of identifying variation and threats to validity.
• A3. Interpret empirical findings, justify methodological choices and communicate conclusions with appropriate qualifications.

• Lectures
• Practical Exercises

Lectures introduce substantive questions and the empirical methods used to address them. Students prepare assigned readings and discuss research designs, findings and limitations in class. Student presentations focus on explaining the comparison underlying a paper’s findings and assessing its evidence, followed by questions.

In practical exercises, students practice how to interpret empirical results, recognize limitations of a study’s causal interpretation and improve its design. A project workshop provides peer and instructor feedback. Each attending student develops an individual research proposal and presents and defends it in class.

Attendance and assessment routes

The attending-student assessment option combines coursework with the final exam. It requires attendance at least 75% of scheduled teaching hours, recorded through Bocconi’s Attendance system, completion of the required coursework, and participation in the student’s assigned article presentation and project discussion. Students who do not meet these requirements take the non-attending assessment route, which is also available to attending students.

The project is a proposal for an empirical study in political economy. Students are not required to collect data or carry out the empirical study (but are encouraged to do so). A workshop provides peer and instructor feedback as they develop their ideas. Students submit a two-page design brief, references and presentation slides before the presentation. These materials support the oral assessment and receive no separate written-paper grade. The 35% project component comprises 10 percentage points for the presentation of the design and 25 for the responses to Q&A, including responses to a change in the research setting or available data.

The in-class exercises and written exam are supervised and completed individually. The exam covers the required readings and learning outcomes. It includes questions on course content and interpretation of evidence, together with a research-design exercise and evaluation of a proposed empirical argument. Students explain why their chosen comparison supports a causal interpretation, discuss the assumptions and possible limitations, and suggest improvements to the design.

Passing the attending route requires at least 18/30 on the written exam and at least 18/30 on the weighted overall assessment. The best three of the four exercise scores count towards the grade. A missed exercise is recorded as zero and can be the score that is dropped.

Non-attending students

The grade is based entirely on an individual, supervised written general exam. It is the same exam as the one given to attending students. A grade of at least 18/30 is required to pass.

The course is based on selected research papers in empirical political economy rather than a single textbook. Required readings, including the sections to prepare where applicable, are identified in the detailed syllabus. Lecture slides, exercise materials and assignment instructions are provided through Blackboard. Attending and non-attending students use the same required readings and slides; additional readings are identified as optional.

Optional background references are Angrist and Pischke, Mastering ’Metrics (2014), for empirical methods, and Persson and Tabellini, Political Economics (2000), for theoretical foundations. Any excerpt explicitly assigned in the syllabus forms part of the required reading. The detailed reading list specifies the versions used for assessment.