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The course is an introduction to the comparative analysis of political institutions, and to the dynamics of modern democracies. It focuses mainly on electoral systems, party systems, executives, parliaments and other elements of the institutional setup of different countries, as well as the performance of diverse political systems.

Students learn how to apply concepts and methods to the analysis of everyday political problems, in order to critically read articles in leading newspapers, blogs, and weekly journals. They will also use statistical tools and the Stata software to perform simple quantitative analyses on economic and political data.

This course aims to present some of the major topics of the current debate in the field of comparative politics, illustrate the way in which (mostly) quantitative models help understanding the effects of different institutional setups, and provide an in-depth understanding of how the main political processes operate within democratic countries. 

The course is usually organized around three separate models, focusing around differeent political institutrions and especially electoral and party systems. It fits into the overall organization of the EPS Master programme by familarizing its students with the empirical test of theoretical oriented hypotheses, and with the relationships between political and economic arenas.

The course aims at providing students with the method, tools and categories of comparative law to be applied to understand, from a diachronic and synchronic point of view, the legal traditions and the variety of forms of State, forms of Government and centre-periphery relations (included secession processes) of countries belonging to different geopolitical areas and sharing different concepts of Constitution. Therefore particular attention will also be paid to the crisis of constitutionalism and to new conceptual categories, such as "abusive constitutionalism", "authoritarian constitutionalism", "hybrid constitutionalism" and "unstable constitutionalism", with a view to studying new phenomena regarding the legal transplant of human rights protection and the separation of powers principles only in nominal terms.

What is society? How can we understand it? What is the role of the individual in society, and how does society affect individual lives? The course offers students the tools and concepts needed for a meaningful exploration into the various systems of our social world. This course is an introduction to a sociological way of thinking to help us better understand the world we live in. The course examines patterns of social relations and interactions, how societies are organized, how cultures develop and change, why inequality exists, and how societies reproduce it. The content of the course reflects both traditional themes like social class and power as well emerging themes such as social movements and sexuality.