Polimetrics

A.Y. 2024/2025
6
Max ECTS
40
Overall hours
SSD
SPS/04
Language
English
Learning objectives
This course aims to teach the basics of party competition, shedding light on different theories and strategies (ranging from the spatial theory of voting, to theories on issue competition, valence politics, populism, negative campaigning, and so on). In addition, students will learn the main techniques (manual or automated) that allow to measure political outcomes, with a focus on estimating the positions of political actors. With respect to this, peculiar attention will be devoted to social media as a source of data.
Expected learning outcomes
At the end of the course, students will be able to analyze and interpret strategies used by political parties to compete in an election campaign. Thanks to lab lectures, attending students will learn how to use existing sources of data about political parties; they will also get familiar with the basics of text analysis, learning how to perform simple analyses using scaling techniques, topic models and sentiment analysis. By doing that, they will also be able to develop and test simple and coherent research questions concerning everyday political competition.
Single course

This course can be attended as a single course.

Course syllabus and organization

Single session

Responsible
Lesson period
Third trimester
Course syllabus
A) Theories of party competition
Spatial theory of voting
Issue competition & issue ownership
Valence competition
Negative campaigning
Nichness & populism
Ambiguity & broad appeal strategy
Intra-party politics
Voters' perceptions
Other political actors

B) Measuring political outcomes & positions of political actors
Hand-coding
Comparative Manifesto Project
Expert surveys
Text-as-data
Scaling techniques
Topic models
Sentiment analysis & Dictionary methods
Social media data
Prerequisites for admission
Statistics and Political Science
Teaching methods
Mixture of theoretical lectures in class + empirical hands-on lectures in lab (after the end of the covid emergency) + research project "brainstorming sessions"
Teaching Resources
The required readings will be made available on the website of the course (https://andreaceron.com/teaching) and on ARIEL
Assessment methods and Criteria
Non-attending students: oral exam

Attending students: class attendance and active participation, particularly on the "online forum" and during the "brainstorming sessions" + oral exam (or written exam with open-ended & multiple-choice questions) + short research paper (in group)
SPS/04 - POLITICAL SCIENCE - University credits: 6
Lessons: 40 hours
Professor: Ceron Andrea
Professor(s)
Reception:
please contact me via email
ms teams / room 303