Courses

Bayesian statistics has gained considerable popularity recently. Some consider its applications in the social sciences cutting edge, others criticize them strongly. The course will present the fundamental ideas and concepts of Bayesian statistical analysis and will compare them to more
traditional statistical methods. Participants will be encouraged to read published Bayesian analyses in political science and during the second half of the course these analyses will be discussed and an attempt will be made to reproduce them.

In the recent decades, the field of security studies has become one of the most dynamic and contested areas in international relations. It has proven conducive to the emergence of a number of vibrant European ‘schools’ that established versatile research agendas. This has developed vis-à-vis the traditionally conservative field of security and strategic studies which has however sought its revival in the post 9/11 era. In order to provide a comprehensive picture of these developments, the course surveys the field of international security as practised by positivist and non-positivist approaches, both from the macro and micro perspective. It aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the contemporary theoretical debates in the discipline and the ability to identify different arguments to critically assess their analytical and empirical purchase. The course consists in several parts. It begins with different approaches to the conceptualisation of security, from the established

Does globalization reduce income and wealth inequalities? Or does it make the rich richer and the poor still poorer? In this course, we will examine long-term trends in global economic inequalities between and within countries, and we will engage with the most important controversies about the measurement and interpretation of inequality. In the first part of the course, major theoretical approaches to global inequality will be introduced and will be discussed against the backdrop of macro-level aggregate data. In the second part, we ‘zoom in’ to consider the inequality effects of trade, cross-border capital movements and international migration.

The course is centred around some of the theoretical debates in contemporary International Relations theory. It is aimed at enhancing students’ ability to analyse the way various theoretical approaches are constructed and interact with each other, operationalised in research designs and productive of particular perspectives on the world. An additional aim is for students to learn to relate their own research to these modes of doing IR. The scene setter of the course is an engagement with some of the key concepts, themes, arguments and research design issues raised by the two currently dominant Western strands of thinking about world politics: liberalism and constructivism. The course then goes on to chart divergent lines of flight away from orthodoxy to heterodoxy. It discusses structural realism, neoclassical realism, Foucauldian IR and neomarxist IR. Later parts of the seminar adopt a more practice-oriented perspective. To this end, the course discusses and critically evaluates

This is a practice-oriented seminar, with the focus on the study of politics ‘from below’ and ‘from within’. It addresses research questions that require an investigation into the meanings of particular political practices, concepts or processes to situational actors in order to illuminate a wider-ranging or more theoretical issues of political concern.

Political ethnography is an interdisciplinary research strategy, based on the immersion of the researcher in the subject matter and geared towards the study of power. While the course does not elaborate on the philosophical underpinnings of interdisciplinary research, it operates at a conceptual level, which presupposes some familiarity with research practice. Because it is interdisciplinary above all else, the participants should be ready to engage with texts from across social sciences.

The seminar is open to all researchers interested in the study of politics, but it is particularly suitable for those that intend

States claim to have a right to issue binding directives to those within their jurisdiction. This claim entails that the addressees have a moral obligation to obey those directives provided certain conditions obtain. The obligation to obey is said to be defeasible but general: it is said to hold with regard to (almost) all directives, (almost) all subjects, on (almost) all occasions. This is the claim of political obligation. It needs to be justified. Can a justification be given to it? Anarchists and classical Marxists answer the question in the negative. Liberals, traditionally, defend a positive answer for a subclass of states (constitutionally limited democracies). The traditional justifications are, typically, voluntaristic in the following sense: they assume that for a person to be politically obligated, s/he must perform an act that counts as undertaking an obligation (consent, acceptance of benefits from a cooperative scheme, etc.), and that act must be performed

This is a doctoral seminar building on the comparative politics and political theory MA courses. Basic questions in political sociology mostly focus on the holders of power and the way power is exercised in a society. In this seminar, sociological analysis is applied to the political field, and attention is paid to social determinants and sources of political power, state formation, theories of the state, civil society, and social movements. Beyond these topics the seminar offers an overview in classic and recent theories of elites and classes with emphasis on New Class and edifferent positional and reputational elite groups (politicians, intellectuals, cultural elites). The relationship between political transformation and elite change, between current forms of globalization and the global justice movements will also be discussed, just as the structure vs agency debate.

The objective of this seminar is to help preparing PhD dissertation proposals and think through related issues of career choice, research strategy, planning, and methodology. The course is structured around the research interests of probationary doctoral students, who present their prospectus plans in class, work together in identifying key issues in developing viable research plans, and revise their prospectus plans to reflect any feedback and insight gained in this process.
The in-class discussions are to focus on the choice and formulation of the research question and the methodology; their justification in terms of relevance, timeliness, and tractability; implications in terms of workload, schedule and resources required, as well as the side-benefits offered; the translation of the research question into a manageable research agenda via hypotheses or other means; the identification of appropriate research methods; concept formation and measurement; the use of productivity

The course is organized to discuss selected issues in public policy from the perspective of normative considerations of justice. More specifically, the course will explore the implications of liberal egalitarianism, now the dominant philosophical outlook within contemporary political theory, for a number of policy problems that have attracted significant public attention in recent decades. The choice of policy problems will be guided either by their centrality from the point of view of the overall justness of society, such as healthcare or education, or by the special nature of the theoretical challenges they represent, such as genetic intervention and long-term climate change. Liberal egalitarianism has been developed into a number of distinct and well-specified rival versions over the last three decades, and its internal controversies may occasionally have important consequences for the policies different versions recommend, but all versions share a couple of central commitments

second part of a 4-credit core course

For both academic scholars and practitioners of public policy skillful processing of information is a key qualification. Methodological and analytical knowledge is of paramount importance to evaluate policies on basis of available data: reports, expert opinions, descriptive or inferential statistics etc. This course introduces students to the basics of research design, and to the quantitative and qualitative methods that can be used in addressing policy-relevant research questions. The course has two major goals: 1) To enhance students’ ‘passive’ literacy of quantitative research methods. In this respect students will learn how to evaluate the adequacy of a given research method for a given research question. They will learn how to judge the quality of reports and academic studies on basis of typical flaws different research techniques may have. 2) To give students active skills and to show them how to apply techniques to original policy studies of their own. The class will give an

This class prepares students for independent and advanced-level research in the field of European integration studies. It targets students who already have a good knowledge of EU policy-making both at an empirical and theoretical level. The course provides access to core debates in European integration studies by critically reviewing existing research in the light of new empirical findings. The course pays particular attention to the challenges of combining the theoretical frameworks and methodological tools of different disciplines in EU studies, and to how concepts and research perspectives developed mainly in the pre-enlargement context can be applied to the politics and policies of the EU-27 and/or require modification. In this the class aims at helping students to advance their own conceptual and empirical research frameworks and to situate themselves and their respective research projects in the wider disciplines of European integration studies.

This course is designed for students who are beginning their dissertation projects. The aim of the course is to give students the tools to conceptualize their theses in terms of research questions and design, methodology, data collection and qualitative analysis. In doing so, this course focuses more narrowly on the issues, problems, and strategies related to “small-N” qualitative research, for the most part setting aside the techniques of large-N statistical analysis, which are best taught in a separate course. Students will read and discuss texts related to theory formation and hypothesis testing; creating proxies and measurement; descriptive and causal inference; longitudinal, comparative and case study research; field data collection; working with texts and analyzing qualitative data; and, finally, dissertation write-up. Throughout the course, we will not avoid issues of epistemology—how we know what we know and how to adjudicate competing “truth” claims. However, since

The focus of this course (core for PE track PhD) is the pattern of alliance and conflict among social forces that shape responses to domestic and international economic challenges: trade, debt, recession, and globalization. We shall explore the links between the character of these societal actors and the dynamics and paths of economic and political development. Students will be acquainted with various schools of social interest-based – that is, class, and sectoral (or industry-group) – approaches to politics and policy making. The studied concepts include the political importance of production factor endowments, the domestic and world political impact of industry life cycles, and the significance of capital mobility across industries or national borders, in politics and policy making. We shall also study varied concepts of the relationship between power and spatial differentiation/integration in the world economy.

The questions we shall discuss include the following. Why do

This seminar will examine critically a number of recent articles and books (most of them by myself) that attempt to analyze trends in "real-existing democracy" at both the national and the supra-national level in Europe. One effort will be to project forward for the next twenty years trajectories established from 1970 to 2000; another will trace the development of various "revolutions"in the practice of democracy at the national level. When it comes to the European Union, we will contrast conflicting opinions concerning its so-called "democracy deficit". In both cases, we shall also discuss various proposals for reform that have been advanced to improve the quality of democracy in this part of the world.

Schedule:
Week 1 (30 Jan-2 Feb) 2 sessions: Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 2 (6-10 Feb) 3 sessions: Tue 17:20-19:00, Wed 17:20-19:00 and Thu 15:30-17:10
Week 3 (13-17 Feb) 3 sessions: Tue 17:20-19:00, Wed 17:20-19:00

The course will focus on political interest mobilization in postindustrial democracies, broadly conceived. That should also include the EU integrated parts of the postcommunist world. Each day is configured around an analytical subject of general interest to students of comparative politics, but with data primarily, but not exclusively, from advanced industrial democracies.