Political Science

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course is intended for students who have a strong background in political science. The course focuses on political communication with emphasis on the relationship between political systems and media systems, political language, political marketing, new media and politics, and media and populism. Special attention is placed on the strategies of effective political communication used in political campaigns both in Europe and the U.S. and the role of mass media in the public sphere and its effects on public opinion. The course also an analysis of the principal forms of online political communication. Required readings include: COMUNICAZIONE POLITICA: LE NUOVE FRONTIERE by D. Campus, MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS: A CHALLENGE FOR DEMOCRACY? By G. Mazzoleni and W. Schultz. The course includes lectures and a series of guest speakers. Assessment is based on a written exam that includes multiple choice and essay questions.

This course provides an introduction to the statistical and econometric theory underlying surveys and counterfactual policy evaluations. Doing so, it sharpens critical appraisal of the very many surveys and policy evaluations found in public discourse, as data-driven evaluations of public policies are becoming commonly used to help societies choose how to organize unemployment insurance, the provisions of health care and education, etc. This course uses mathematical notation and proofs and engages with mathematically formalized material.

In this course, students consider the democratic process and address the central question of why electors behave the way they do. The course provides students with an analysis of the nature of British and American psephological trends to help them understand national and comparative theories about voting behavior. This involves the exploration of models of voting behavior, and the analysis of the impact of contextual factors such as the existing democratic culture and election campaigning. Students work to achieve an understanding of modern psephology. They analyze the impact of social cleavages - such as class, geography, ethnicity, gender, and age - upon electoral behavior. They also learn to assess the utility of social psychological and issue-based approaches to voting behavior. Students scrutinize the structural impact of the electoral environment, including the media, the established rules of the game, campaigning, polling, and party organizations, and consider how all these factors shape our political landscape.

This course studies Robert Dahl's DEMOCRACY AND ITS CRITICS, a modern classic of democratic theory, to develop the ability to think about democracy in a critical and informed way. It considers how the concepts presented in the work frame issues facing contemporary democracy. Through deep reading, the course provides an opportunity to understand every aspect of and engage in a dialogue with this modern classic to discover its full richness.

The course examines the political theory of finance, which investigates the broad normative and theoretical questions provoked by financial markets, institutions, and crises in contemporary societies. Large-scale financial intermediaries and global financial markets are reshaping capitalism, and these transformations raise fundamental issues of efficiency, fairness, inclusion, and democratic accountability in the design and functioning of finance. Topics include historical debates about usury and speculation, the contemporary philosophy of money and debt, the right to credit and to default, discrimination and credit ratings, systemic risk and collective responsibility, the challenges finance and central banking pose to democracy, and the potential for radical alternatives, ranging from cryptocurrencies to public finance.