The Economics and Politics of Transboundary Conflict (POL145)

This course will focus on authoritarian politics, interstate conflict, and empirical testing of existing theories. The course aims to (1) familiarize students with empirical methods used in Comparative Politics and International Relations literature, (2) learn about the most consequential work in the areas of comparative authoritarianism and interstate conflict, (3) attempt at replicating results from these existing studies, and (4) conduct original empirical tests that might be used in students’ future bachelor theses.  By the end of the course students will have empirical tools and theoretical knowledge at their disposal to analyze real world events.

• To understand the basics of panel models.
• To learn about the innerworkings and classification of authoritarian regimes.
• Analyze the economics and politics of authoritarian regimes.
• To study recent work on authoritarian politics and interstate conflict.
• Learn how to compare various economic and political outcomes between countries.
• Learn how to do individual research and run empirical tests.
• To learn about R programming and tools that make it more efficient, such as R Studio, and R Markdown.