Polimetrics

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.

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.