Comparative Political Systems

The course aims to provide students with the basic skills for collecting, treating and analysing information in the form of data. More in detail, students will learn how to find and download data on politics, society, economics and law using some of the most important online data hubs, how to build a dataset, and how to analyse - that is, describe, summarise and present - the information contained in a dataset using statistics.

Knowledge and understanding: The course provides an introductory comprehension of the most important political institutions and dynamics in modern democracies. It focuses mainly on electoral systems, party systems, executives, parliaments and other elements of the institutional setup of different countries, as well as the performance of diverse political systems.
Applying knowledge and understanding: Students learn how to apply concepts and methods to the analysis of everyday political problems, in order to critically read articles in leading newspapers, blogs, and weekly journals. They will also use statistical tools to perform simple quantitative analyses.
Making judgements: Students learn how to use their newly acquired skills to formulate informed judgements and to apply these to the normative problems of contemporary societies.
Communication and learning skills: Students develop communication skills by preparing and presenting short essays that illustrate the results their individual or collective work has yielded, thus improving their capacity to identify a research question, find and independently verify different sources of information, transform them into datasets, propose a feasible research strategy, and uncover (positive or negative) evidence to support or refute the original hypothesis.