Polimetrics

This course is aimed to teach how to apply the spatial theory of voting in different settings to better understand the entire political cycle: from electoral competition to government formation. Students will also learn the main theories and the connected methods available in the literature to estimate the policy space within which political interactions occur as well as to measure the positions of political actors interacting in such space. To this aim, enrolled students will be introduced to different open-source software during the lab-classes.

At the end of the course the student must be able to present a better knowledge of the processes producing a government formation. Enrolled students will also learn, during the lab lectures, how to link theoretical questions to empirical analysis to answer relevant political questions related for example to government stability.