PWM-VP-HS2: The Politics of Legislative Debate (Mi 10-12)

Dozent/in:

Alexander Herzog

Angaben:

Seminar, 2 SWS, ECTS: 8

Termine:

Mi, 10:00 - 12:00, F21/03.50

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Prerequisites/Voraussetzungen: BA or equivalent qualification in Political Science.

Registration/Deregistraton/An-/Abmeldung in FlexNow!: 02. April/10:00 bis 28. April 2024/23:59

Start/Beginn:17 April 2024

Assessment/Erwerb eines Leistungsnachweises: Portfolio consisting of a term paper and oral and written reports.

ECTS:8

Consulation hours during semester on demand/ Sprechstunden im Semester nach vorheriger Vereinbarung: alexander.herzog(at)uni-bamberg.de

Inhalt:

A key function of legislatures in democratic systems is to discuss and debate policy proposals, bills, and other political issues. Participating in legislative debates gives members of parliament an opportunity to voice their opinion, express their opposition or support, and to have their statements entered into an official parliamentary transcript, where what they said is permanently recorded and accessible to other political actors, news organizations, and the public. With the digitalization of such parliamentary records in many countries and the development of statistical and computer-assisted methods to analyze textual data, scholarly attention to legislative debates has increased significantly during the past decade. Political scientists have used legislative debates to study fundamental questions of the political process, such as the quality of representation, levels of party cohesion and polarization, and the effectiveness of legislative scrutiny.
This seminar will provide an overview of theoretical and empirical research on legislative debates. We will start by reviewing existing theories that explain the role of deliberation in the legislative process, who participates in legislative debates, and what factors influence the content of speeches. We will pay particular attention to how differences in institutions and political systems inform our understanding of the politics of legislative debates. We will next review and apply computer-assisted approaches for the analysis of legislative speech, using the programming language R.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Back, Hanna, Marc Debus, and Jorge M. Fernandes, eds. "The Politics of Legislative Debates." (2021). Chapters 1-5 and selected country chapters (available online through Oxford Academic)

Grimmer, Justin, and Brandon M. Stewart. "Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts." Political Analysis 21, No. 3 (2013): 267-297.

Benjamin E. Lauderdale and Alexander Herzog, “Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech.” Political Analysis 24, No. 3 (2016): 374-394.

PWM-VP-HS3: Far Right Parties and Their Electorate (Mo 12-14)

Dozent/in:

Alexander Herzog

Angaben:

Seminar, 2 SWS, ECTS: 8

Termine:

Mo, 12:00 - 14:00, FMA/00.08

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Prerequisites/Voraussetzungen: BA or equivalent qualification in Political Science.

Registration/Deregistraton/An-/Abmeldung in FlexNow!: 02 April 2024/10:00 bis 28 April 2024/23:59

Start/Beginn: 15 April 2024

Assessment/Erwerb eines Leistungsnachweises: Portfolio consisting of a term paper and oral and written reports.

ECTS: 8

Consulation hours during semester on demand/Sprechstunden im Semester nach vorheriger Vereinbarung: alexander.herzog(at)uni-bamberg.de

Inhalt:

In many European political systems, far-right parties have gained electoral strength in recent years. In this seminar, we will explore theoretical and empirical research on far-right parties and their electorate from a comparative perspective. We will begin by addressing conceptual issues and differences in the ideological traits of the far right. We will then examine explanations for the electoral success of far-right parties and their impact on party competition, public opinion, and policies.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Mudde, Cas. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Arzheimer, Kai. "Contextual factors and the extreme right vote in Western Europe, 1980–2002." American Journal of Political Science 53.2 (2009): 259-275.

Golder, Matt. "Far right parties in Europe." Annual Review of Political Science 19 (2016): 477-497.