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. The course intends to offer an opportunity to learn about the electoral behaviour of citizens and its determinants, individual and contextual and how it varies across countries and over time.
The formative goals are twofold. First to increase the knowledge of the multifaceted working of contemporary democracies at grassroots, looking at electroal participation and its determinants and the subsequent party choice. Second to increase the skills to read, analyse, comment and discuss existing empirical studies on comparative electroal behavioir.
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. Attendants students will be graded taking into account three benchmarks.
1.knowledge of a short list of conceptual papers on elections and poltical behaviour,
2. Public presentation and discussion of an assigned papers on how how voters make up their mind when they decide to vote ad who to vote, in Europe and USA,
3. A final witten essay of not more than 5000 words on topic of their own choice
Non attendant Students will be graded on their knowledge of the volume indicated in the the relattive section.
Both final examination will be oral.

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.