Political Science

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course introduces the analysis of conflicts and international interventions providing an overview of major theoretical approaches and empirical applications in those fields. The course deals with the conceptual and methodological tools provided by academic literature and applies such concepts and methods to analysis of major conflicts and experiences of international interventions. The course starts by introducing the major strands of research that analyzed conflict onset and dynamics. Then, an overview of scholarship on interventions is presented and discussed. Finally, 6 seminars are devoted to the application of theories to the analysis of wars (and interventions) in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Colombia, the Sahel region, and Syria.

This course examines the rise of risk-based policy-making and risk regulation for scientific, technological, and environmental developments. Students explore definitions of risk and the terminology for risk governance, (changing) perceptions and attitudes to risk in public and private organizations, as well as established and new approaches to managing and regulating risk. These issues are explored through a number of deep dive case studies and sessions from several fields: healthcare and pharmaceutical (including Covid-19), the environment and climate change, digital technologies and cyber-physical systems, and food safety. Particular attention is paid to addressing uncertainty and ambiguity, and what good governance of uncertain risks entails via models such as "planned adaptive risk regulation." 

This course gives an introduction to data-driven research in political science and sociology. The examples will include data from Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook and parliamentary records. Data from many countries including Japan, Ukraine, and Nigeria, as well as international institutions and websites, will be discussed. The analytical techniques include text analysis (sentiment analysis and topic modeling), network analysis, descriptive statistics and visualization, and statistical techniques such as regression analysis.

This course analyzes the international security environment in Japan, including its new national security and defense policy as well as its challenges. The course is a combination of lectures and class discussion – the instructor provides lectures based on their extensive experience working for the Japanese government in the planning and implementation of national security and defense policy, particularly in the fields of legislation, policy framework, Japan-US Alliance, and international security cooperation. Students are required to prepare for each class session by reading the relevant part of the White Paper in advance.

This course offers a comparative study of the institutional law of international organizations. While it is acknowledged that each organization has its own legal structure and functioning, institutional challenges and rules of different organizations resemble each other in some way, and a great deal of body of institutional rules and principles has been developed. International organizations have much in common, such as the law on membership, competence, structures, decision-making and implementation, financing, and legal personality. The course discusses the practice of a number of international organizations, including the United Nations and regional as well as subregional organizations. The course explores the law, life, and functioning of these organizations.

Looking at the trends and status of post-war Japanese foreign policy and applying the analysis of foreign policy from a comparative foreign policy perspective, this course pursues a historical and theoretical understanding and deepening of Japanese foreign policy. Topics include the nature and peculiarities of Japanese politics; aspects of continuity and discontinuity; how political power is controlled; Japanese politics in the 1990s (Japan in crisis); and the future of Japanese politics.

This course aims to educate on the theories and concepts relevant to the field of stratification and inequality. The course covers the following topics:  intergenerational social mobility; educational inequality in comparative perspective; institutional arrangements in shaping educational inequality; education and labor market; the role of social capital and labor market; gender inequality, and racial and ethnic inequality.

This course examines the functioning of democracies in a context of high economic interdependence. To do so, the course is structure into two parts. In the first part, students learn how to define and measure globalization; how institutions emerge and change and how political institutions have contributed to the development of globalization. In the second part of the course, the focus is on analyzing the relationship between democracy and globalization. In this part of the course, the main topics cover the relationship between globalization and political accountability; the surge of technocracy and the tension with the democratic ideal of self government, and the socio-economic consequences of globalization. These topics provide the basis to understand more complex problems like Brexit, the collapse of establishment parties or the rise of populism. 

Economic policies differ widely across countries and – within the same country – even over time. Among OECD countries, government expenditure ranges from less than 40% in the US to almost 60% in Finland. What explains these large differences? The many tools provided by economic theory generally fail to offer a complete and satisfactory answer to this question. The course mission is to analyze the determinants of economic policy in modern democracies and to show how these policies may differ according to the different political institutions in place. The course consists of four parts. The first part of the course discusses the tools of political economics. The second part of the course compares the welfare states across industrialized countries, with special emphasis on the pension systems and the labor market, and discusses the political feasibility of structural reforms. It also addresses the differences in economic policies that may arise from the political institutions, with particular emphasis on the analysis of the electoral rule and of the regime type. The third part analyzes dynamic policies – public debt, economic growth – in a political economy framework to understand how political incentives shape current and future policies. The last part addresses the debate between the role of culture and institutions in shaping economic growth. To feel comfortable in this course, students should be familiar with the optimization techniques learned in math and microeconomic courses.

This course analyzes the place of gender in world politics. It introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of gender in international relations, and reviews different fields of research, focusing on security studies, with cutting-edge literature. The course examines how both the practice of international politics and the academic discipline are gendered. It takes its starting point by reflecting on international relations theory to understand why the mainstream of international relations has traditionally had difficulties in engaging with feminist critiques. It looks at the early feminist debates and turns to themes of international relations such as war, conflict, militarism, and security through a gender perspective. It analyzes the role of bodies in international relations and their complex intersecting identities to understand how gender is intertwined with categories such as race, class, and sexuality. The question of how these complex identities give subjects possibility for agency runs throughout the modules. The course emphasizes how gender, security, and politics are discursively constructed through both language and images. To shed light on these discursive constructions, the course conducts several case studies.