Comparative Political Behavior

The learning objectives is to increase the students' skills to build their own research design on one of the main topics of the course. This will be accomplish thanks two instruments. First, asking them to present and discuss in class a paper or book chapter and second to write an essay of their own choice, after having discusses with the instructor the topic, the research strategy and the paper structure. According to the student's willingness or competence, the final written paper can be an empirical or a review paper.

Expected outcomes are:
Knowledge of the main aspects of electoral behavior variation across countries and over elections, building eventually on what they already have learnt on the topic in the previous cycle.
Increase their understanding of how the individual electoral behavior relates to contextual characteristics as political institutions (governing, representative and electoral rules) usually addressed in other courses.
Increase their personal competence in making judgement on the outcomes and the characteristics of the electoral behavior, focusing how the former might be quite different from the standard after election journalistic or political accounts.
Increasing their capacity to develop their own research on what elections and electoral behaviour.