Comparative Political Behavior

Democratic Politics is not only a game among elites. Elites attitudes and behaviour are important. But main street people too are involved in the game. They may be interested in politics. Some of them may decide to be involved in politics. Most of them have the habit to turnout in elections and to express a vote choice, indicating that they expect that their views are represented or that they think to take into account what the government has done. All these activities are the engine of a vibrant democracy. On the other side political elites may or not contribute to make meaningful the vote choices of citizens. The course intends to offer an opportunity to learn about the concept of political representation , the different dimension of political representation and our understanding on how the representational linkage works according to different conditions. The goals of this course are to. First to increase the awareness of the multifaceted working of contemporary democracies. Second to increase the skills to read, analyse, comment and present in public existing empirical studies. The course will be based on a series of seminars in which students are invited to take part actively. Class attendance is not mandatory, but strongly recommended. Students will be graded taking into account their understanding of a short list of conceptual papers on representation, their presenting and commenting the assigned papers on how the representational linkage works in Europe and USA, and finally their final essay of not more than 5000 words.

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