番茄社区

Prof Rafael Hortala-Vallve

This course is available on the MSc in Political Science (Political Behaviour) and MSc in Political Science (Political Science and Political Economy). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

It is required that students have some familiarity with formal models (game theory) and basic statistical concepts.

In this course we will introduce behavioural concepts and use them in explaining decisions of politicians, candidates for political office, voters, lobbyists, and other actors in the political and policymaking arena. The focus of the course will be academic but we will also visit the recent development by public policy practitioners – both the UK and the US have behavioural insights teams working closely with the executive branch.

We will analyse different political phenomena that do not perfectly fit our rational choice models. We will cover issues such as turnout in large elections, populist policies, framing of public policies to influence public opinion, attribution of blame to politicians, opt-in/opt-out policies and paternalism in policy recommendations, etc. By introducing insights from psychology to our classical political economy models we will study the effects of social, cognitive, and emotional factors on political decisions. Parallel to this formal analysis we will also introduce experimental methods.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 24 hours in the Winter Term. There will be a reading week in WT Week 6.

A presentatioin on the topic of your summative essay to be delivered in an extra session in WT Week 9.

Berggren, N (2012), “Time for behavioural political economy? An analysis of articles in behavioural economics”, Review of Austrian Economics

De Rooij, E (2009), “Field Experiments on Political Behavior and Collective Action”, Annual Review of Political Sc