Global Challenges to Democracy

The course addresses key factors challenging contemporary representative democracies, the causes driving "autocratization", the mechanisms of "democratic backsliding", and both domestic and international factors undermining the legitimacy of democratic systems. The course also introduces the students to some possible responses that representative institutions and political actors can adopt to strengthen public support for democracy. The course employs the comparative approach, which represents the mainstream method for testing hypotheses in the field of political science, and quantitative techniques for data analysis. Both aggregate-level and individual-level data will be investigated.

By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the analytical tools to study the main threats to contemporary representative democracies and with a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to these problems in the broad field of comparative politics. Students will develop analytical skills in the critical use of data for understanding the social, political, cultural and economic stresses facing democracies across the world and innovatively engaging with these challenges in academic, government and NGO settings.