API-414

Citizen Politics

Spring 2009

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Aims and objectives:

This course provides the analytical knowledge and practical skills to understand patterns of mass activism in democratic politics worldwide, including in established and newer democracies. The course covers the nature of mass belief systems, modes of political activism and protest politics, value change and ideological orientations, electoral behavior, the structure of political alignments, confidence in government, issues of political representation, and the implications of citizen politics for democratic institutions.

The first half of the course will review the research literature to understand the theoretical concepts and empirical literature. The second will then apply these in research projects using cross-national time-series survey datasets, such as the World Values Survey, the Afro-barometer, the Latin-Barometer, the Euro-Barometer, and the European Social Survey.  The course will also provide an introduction to using Stata and/or SPSS for survey analysis.