Kurs-Information

Do politicians and parties do what they say? What are the scope conditions for keeping or breaking election promises? Do voters notice broken promises? What do voters perceive as a broken promise? What political cost is associated with breaking promises? In the course, we will analyze these critical questions concerning representative democracy. In the applied part that builds on our discussion of the literature, we address (often in groups) the practical research challenges we face when studying the above questions: (How) Can we reliably code if a statement is a promise and to what extent it has been fulfilled? Can we replicate results from studies? Can we identify conditions for promise keeping based on arguments we find in the literature (e.g., regarding coalitions, party type, or the gender of legislators) or based on ideas by the students? Participants should be willing to learn to conduct basic reliability tests, tests for differences between groups, and regression analyses (in Stata, Excel, or R). The aim is for students to form their own views about whether politicians stay true to their promises and to develop and implement a first small research project. We will discuss all project ideas in class.