Empirical international relations: research and methods

The course has three crucial aims. The first goal is to provide students with a detailed overview of contemporary research topics in IR. In particular, the course highlights the peculiarities of conducting research in this field by employing a rigorous empirical perspective. The second objective is to show students how to structure an effective research article, building in an effective way all the components of the design, from an appealing research question to a solid theoretical framework, and from the use of new data to the employment of adequate methods. Finally, the third aim is to acquaint students with state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative methods, from text-analysis to Bayesian process tracing, and from multivariate analysis to natural experiments. These methodological skills will be very helpful for students not only to conduct academic research and to write their term papers and dissertations, but also for their future careers in NGOs, International Organizations, think tanks, and the private sector.

At the end of the course, students will be familiar with the empirical language of International Relations, and with all the components of a scientific article's research design. They will be able to distinguish solid from weak research and they will have the tools to discuss thoroughly their scientific work and that of others. Furthermore, students will acquire a basic knowledge of various up-to-date quantitative and qualitative research methods and of statistical software. Thus, they will have sufficient skills to perform basic tasks with R and to produce simple empirical analyses employing different methods.