Political Science

This course examines the Spanish political system and its evolution, and compares and contrasts it to other systems of the world. It is divided into three parts: institutional framework, elections, and political culture.

Political geography studies the links between power and space. This course focuses on the role of territorial states in our world. The relationship between states and their territories constantly changes but remains important to understanding the geopolitical changes related to different conceptualizations of what a nation-state is. This course considers questions such as how states control their territories and how the political order of different geographical areas is organized. It also analyzes the links between the political organization of these territories and the way their societies and economies change. The course provides an overview of contemporary political geography, its background as a sub-discipline, its main subjects, concepts, and theoretical underpinnings, as well as considers a selection of ongoing debates on issues where power and space are at stake. Some major themes covered in the course include the nature and formation of states and the global state system, the role of nationalism and territorial identities, how and why political systems change over time and how this relates to dynamics in other fields, the role of geographical scale levels in politics and how and why political systems vary between different parts of the world. While different scale levels are discussed, the emphasis is on the macro-level of the transforming nation-state, their geopolitical relations, and how citizens react and relate to these political structures.

This course provides an overview of empirical, analytical, and theoretical knowledge on the interaction between Islam and the notions of state and power. The course combines historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches in order to provide students with a concrete knowledge of Islam as a religion and as a matrix of a series of political thoughts that are both sophisticated and different from Western European and North American models. Through practical and empirical case studies, the course engages an advanced reflection on the theoretical models and systematic political rationalities carried by ideologies driven by the values and history of Islam.

The course is divided into three sections. The first section starts with a focus on European Foreign Policy for foreign policy analysis and vice versa. It considers what theories in International Relations can help explain the conduct of European Foreign Policy. Next, the institutional framework of the EU’s foreign policy and the role of the member states in the formation of policy are considered. Finally, main external relations policies themselves are reviewed in detail. Main policy areas include: Common Defense Policy, Common Security Policy, Economic and Trade Policy, and Enlargement Policy. 

This course introduces students to the methods and practices by which they can use data to answer questions in political science. It focuses on learning how to collect, manage, and analyze data using computer software and how to effectively communicate results to others. The goal is to understand the core concepts in statistical procedures and causal inference; to learn how to explore and manage data and conduct statistical analysis; and to understand core programming concepts in the R language and apply these concepts to complete in-class activities and problem sets. Topics include Introduction to R and R Studio, Basics of Data Management (Finding and opening data, Understanding data structure; Subsetting), Summarizing Data (Measures of central tendency and dispersion), Data Visualization, Research Design, Probability and Sampling, Confidence Intervals; Hypothesis Testing, Causality and Experimental Analysis, Bivariate Regression, and Multivariate Regression.