Political Science

Given the general purposes of the bachelor degree program, this course aims at examining the main paradigms, concepts, methods and research fields in Political Science. The aim of the course is to analyse political systems under a comparative perspective, paying particular attention to both the major contemporary Western democratic polities (from the most important European democracies to the United States of America, and to the European Union as a political and institutional model of compound democracy) and to non democratic polities.
The course is articulated along three units:
- the first unit provides a general introduction to politics and the key concepts and terms of the political theory and the political science (i.e. State, Constitution and Rule of law, liberalism, democratic and not democratic regimes, power);
- the second unit deals with the classical themes of the political science, such as the political participation, political parties and party systems, parliamentary institutions and governments, in the context of contemporary representative democracies; privileged attention will be given to the study of the Italian political system, its origins, its evolution over time and its own fundamental structures;
- the third unit analyses the process of integration of European Union, with regard to its current political and institutional framework, and the global dimension of contemporary political phenomena, paying particular attention on the evolution of the Nation-State in the globalization era and the context of International relations.

Knowledge and Understanding: at the end of the course, students will acquire a set of analytical, methodological and interpretative skills, related to the functioning of the contemporary political systems, within democratic and non-democratic polities, as well as within supranational institutions like the European Union as a compound democracy. These skills will be useful for the analysis of political behavior in several fields (electoral behavior, political representation, representation of business interests, Parliament and Government functioning and relationships, law making and public policy implementation), and within different institutional contexts.
Applying Knowledge and Learning Skills: this toolkit will allow students analyzing autonomously political systems, and their main actors and fundamental processes. The understanding of these processes will be combined with a relatively thorough knowledge of the evolution and functioning of the Italian political system.
Communication Skills: students will learn to communicate the contents and results of the analysis of a given political system to several interlocutors, specialists and non-specialists ones.