Social Sciences – Master's level (all)

This lecture gives an overview of selected theoretical concepts and the main research findings in the field of Comparative Government, specifically focusing on the role of political institutions and their impact for political decision-making at all stages in the political process. The course introduces a number of core themes in the comparative study of political institutions, such as electoral institutions and their effects on turnout, voting behaviour and party strategies. In addition, the lecture focuses on the impact of different institutional designs on patterns of party competition, government formation and coalition governance. In a third step, we discuss the effects of political institutions and of personal characteristics of legislators on various aspects of decision-making within parliaments and governments.

The main goal of this lecture is to present an introduction to theoretical approaches, key concepts, and substantive issues in comparative political behavior. Building on a multi-level perspective, it will provide an overview of key concepts and theories in the analysis of micro-level processes of political behavior that are embedded in and feed into macro-level processes. Capitalizing on this analytical perspective, the lecture will also address major changes in the relationship between societal and political processes and institutions.

Until the Easter break, this course will be held online via Zoom.

IPE Vorlesung:
This lecture offers an introduction to current research topics in the field of International Political Economy (IPE). It examines how international and domestic politics interact with global flows of goods, finance, and people across national borders. After introducing what it means to study IPE in the age of globalization, the course addresses four major themes of current IPE research. We will learn about internationale trade and the chances and challenges that come with the intensifying exchange of goods across the globe. Lectures on international finance will focus on how global financial flows interact with political and economic stability, instability, and crises. We will also focus on international development and will learn about patterns of global economic inequality and development aid. The lecture will also adress the role of international institutions for the globalized economy.

The security of individuals and states depends profoundly on international politics. Beyond the realm of security, structures and actors of “global governance” have been proliferating for many years. They influence crucial public policies in diverse ways. This lecture surveys academic debates on key topics of international politics, including: the sources of war, peace, and terrorism, the emergence and operation of international organizations and transnational civil society, and the making of key international policy outcomes including respect for human rights.

This course is a continuation of the intro into Game Theory and surveys key applications of game theory with a particular emphasis on the link of theories, methods and empirics. Emphasis will be placed on prominent applications of those concepts in political science, in both comparative and international politics. Topics covered include electoral competition, delegation, political agency, governmental veto players, authoritarian politics, manipulation, war and crisis bargaining. While the focus is on understanding applied work, previous training in game theory is required. Students will build upon their previous game theory training to become informed consumers of scholarship utilizing the methodology and begin to learn how to apply game-theoretic logic to their own work. The course is partly taught from lecture notes, at other times students present a research paper and stimulate discussion in class.

Elections are key institutions in democracies and provide opportunities to bring about changes in the partisan balance which, in turn, can affect government policies. This seminar focuses on the analysis of changes in voting behavior at the individual and aggregate level. Thereby, it tackles questions such as how and why such changes occur or not. It will address key concepts and theories, substantive and methodological issues in the field. Students will review empirical studies in the field and prepare research papers in which they analyze specific questions using available data.

In this course, we study economic inequality from a political economy perspective. First, we will discuss various concepts of economic inequality and different ways to measure it. Then, we will investigate general trends in these various forms of economic inequality across the world. Second, we will discuss the scholarly literature on the determinants of economic inequality, focusing on both political and economic factors. In a third section, we will examine the literature on the implications of economic inequality as regards a variety of political and economic outcomes. The methodological focus of this seminar will be on quantative methods for causal inference.

We live in interesting times both, economically and politically. Many observers point to crises and uncertain developments in the economic and political world. Making sense of the nature of these challenges and pointing toward economic and political solutions for the future requires new perspectives. This is a course about the big and bold questions in economics and politics. How can or should economics and politics be organized to best serve society? What does it mean to put humans as they really are at the center of economic and political thinking? What role do morals and values or dignity and respect play for the way economics and politics work?

We will try to come to grips with these questions by reading and discussing six key books on various new perspectives at the intersection between economics and politics. The aim of this course is to go as deep as we can and to get as much out of an in-class discussion of the material as possible. Willingness to acquire and read the books is a must. If you are unsure about whether or not you would want to take on the commitment of reading six books in one semester then this course is probably not the right one for you.

Students need to be willing to read books, form their own opinions on them, and elaborate on and defend their own views in group discussions and a final essay.

This tutorial accompanies the course “Advanced Quantitative Methods” in the M.A. program in Political Science.

This tutorial accompanies the course “Advanced Quantitative Methods” in the M.A. program in Political Science.

Please note: This course will be taught online until the Easter break (April 11 – April 24). After the break the course will be in-person in room B244 again.

The course provides a broad overview over methods of longitudinal data analysis, with a focus on the analysis of panel data. Compared to cross-sectional data, panel data can allow to improve causal inference. The first objective of this course is to understand why and under which conditions this is the case. In the next step, we will discuss a variety of different modeling approaches to panel data (fixed effects, random effects, first difference) and learn how to decide between these models.

It is highly recommended to participate in the parallel exercises to this lecture, in which the presented models  are applied to real datasets using the statistical programming language R. Although prior knowledge of R is not a prerequisite for attending the lecture/tutorial, we recommend that students without any knowledge of R work through one or more of the introductory R tutorials prior to or during the first weeks of the course. Some resources can be found here and we will point to additional resources during the first weeks of the course:  https://rstudio.cloud/learn/primers ; http://www.statmethods.net/ ; https://swirlstats.com/ ; https://datacamp.com

Information for Mannheim Master in Data Science students:
Please be aware that there are only 3 places reserved for students of the Mannheim Master in Data Science. You can register via the portal until 31.01.2022. Places will be allocated randomly after this deadline. Please check on February 1, 2022 to see if you are (still) registered.

Please note:

The seminar will take place during the University of Heidelberg spring semester running from 28 April – 31 July 2022.
The course will start with two lectures most likely taking place in presence at the University of Heidelberg (28 April & 5 May, 10AM-12PM).
Following lectures most likely online and arranged with students.

Students from Mannheim should register on Portal2 and on the Moodle's platform: https://moodle.uni-heidelberg.de/
More info will be sent by email shortly before the beginning of the course.

The seminar will be instructed by Stefano Balietti (stefano.balietti awi.uni-heidelberg.de). If you have any questions please contact him.

This seminar is composed of two interlocking parts:

• Part 1: Students will learn about the blockchain technology, what it is and what new economic and governance possibilities is enabling for individuals, firms, organizations and national states.
• Part 2: Students will learn about the novel, critical solutions to “radically” redesign our socio-economic systems introduced in the book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, and evolved into the RadicalXchange social movement.

The goal of this seminar is to creatively combine insights from both parts to generate innovative solutions to address some of the shortcomings of current socio-economic systems.

Blockchain Economics

The blockchain is a global technology which aims to revolutionize several areas of society by extending its tenets of decentralization, transparency, and verifiability to domains in which it was previously impossible or impractical. The blockchain popularity is often associated and confused with that of Bitcoin, however Bitcoin is just its oldest application, alongside many other promising ones.

For instance, the blockchain technology can enormously reduce frictional costs of financial services, eliminating the “middle-man” costs and allowing seemingly instantaneous payments across the globe just for fractional fees. The blockchain technology can also improve the trust in and the efficiency of supply chain systems by allowing anyone to trace each product to its source, simply by looking up the records in a distributed digital ledger. The blockchain technology can also be used to create solid digital economies in gaming environments, where collectibles and other digital assets can be reliably owned, sold, and exchanged.

Notwithstanding the rapidly evolving ecosystem of new applications, many commentators have described the blockchain as a “solution in search of a problem.” This seminar invites students to boldly fill this gap, by thinking at the blockchain technology at its maximum level of abstraction: as a tool to create, test and validate economic and governance designs.

Topics: Blockchain Technology, Different Blockchains, Consensus Mechanisms, Cryptocurrencies, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), the Metaverse and NFTs, Tokenization, Governance, Privacy.

Radical Markets

The book “Radical Markets” by Posner and Weyl argues that wealthy countries face a triple social crisis of rising inequality, economic stagnation, and failing political legitimacy. This crisis results from a failure of ideas and it proposes a new set of policies labeled “Radical Markets” that are at once more free market than the right and more egalitarian than the left to reunite the classic liberal coalition. Radical Markets argues that expanding the scope of markets is the only way to reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts.  The final aim of the book is to show how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation. This seminar invites students to embrace the bold and radical vision put forward in this book to daringly develop new solutions to socio-economic problems, as well as to criticize and improve upon the solutions proposed by Posner and Weyl.

Topics: Private Property, Auctions, Quadratic Voting, Immigration Sponsorships, Antitrust Laws, Data Labor and Dignity, Intersectional Social Identities.

Field experiments are powerful tools for measuring social phenomena such as honesty, cooperation, trust and discrimination in real-life contexts.  This seminar will provide students with first-hand experience in designing and analyzing field experiments. Working as a class, we will also conduct a lost letter experiment involving original data collection in Mannheim and the surrounding cities.  Finally, students will have the opportunity to develop and workshop their own field experimental designs. The first part of the course will be online via zoom but the rest of the semester (after Easter) is planned in-person.

For long, education has been seen as a “giant sorting machine” for life chances in industrialized societies (Dunlop et al. 1975). This truism has been holding for decades. In light of technological changes and the expansion of knowledge-based tasks, education might increase its importance even more. Yet, educational opportunities are unevenly distributed. Social origin (parental class, income, education, wealth as well as (epi-)genetic dispositions), ethnic background, and gender affect chances of educational transitions and educational attainment. Inequality of educational opportunities also vary by country and across time. In the seminar on educational inequalities in Europe, we discuss classic and more recent theories of educational inequalities, different trends over time and cross-national variation in Europe, and we focus on selected dimensions of educational inequalities.

Experimental research designs are called the silver bullet or ‘Königsweg’ for causal identification. In recent years, the growing interest in causal identification and mechanism testing made experimental designs a regular empirical research tool in the social sciences – most recently in political science and sociology. This seminar shall give a broad overview of the range of experimental methods such as survey, field, lab-in-the-field, and laboratory experiments. We will discuss classical and recent work, including shortcomings and best practices like transparency (open science) and ethical considerations in experimental research methods. In addition, students will learn to think critically about different (experimental) research designs and design their own experiment to answer a research question they have developed.

In the age of increasing migration and the raise of right-wing populist parties the question of how to measure and explain xenophobic and populist attitudes becomes very important. While xenophobia has already been investigated for a long time, even if it still constitutes a controversial issue how to measure it, research on populist attitudes has started only very recently. In this seminar current and innovative approaches as well as ideas for further developments will be discussed. Moreover, existing studies will be replicated to explore them more deeply.

This course provides an introduction to formal models in the social sciences. It discusses a series of basic prototypes which have proved to be important tools for theory construction in various fields. Relating to the general model of sociological explanation (‘Coleman boat’), the focus is on processes of the steps of (non-trivial) aggregation and on dynamics over time. Topics covered are, for example, exchange, strategic action, collective action and the evolution of cooperation, mobilisation, diffusion, or segregation. While most of the models and examples chosen might already be fairly well known, this course puts specific emphasis on explaining the math behind them in more detail than usual and on practically ‘playing around’ with the models. Thus, it will provide some expertise and training in general formal skills, such as game theory, difference equations, differential equations, and agent-based simulation. The aim is to enable participants in principle to modify, extend or combine existing models according to their own research questions.

Welfare states provide social protection against social risks, this should hold particularly during a crisis. Whether European welfare states contribute to the resilience of societies during a crisis is currently debated. During a recession, employment protection, unemployment benefits and active labour market policies mitigate the risk of job loss. In addition, minimum income schemes should provide a basic safety net for jobless or low work-intensive households. Also, public pensions provide an income security to people in retirement, while funded pensions maybe negatively affected during a crisis. During the last crises, job retention policies (or short-time work schemes) were sought to limit mass unemployment and secure income during the crisis. However, an economic crisis puts additional pressure on financial sustainability of social spending, leading to austerity reform pressures. The seminar will study the resilience of welfare states in respect to their capacity to mitigate economic crises, to absorb the employment shock and adapt to newly arising social risks. Besides more historical economic crises, the Great Recession that started in 2008 and the Great Pandemic since 2020 will be used to study the different welfare state responses across European countries in a comparative perspective.

In the wake of the digital revolution, societies store an ever-increasing amount of data on humans and their behavior. In parallel, advances in computational power & methods allow for meaningful interpretations of such data. This enables social scientists to approach old questions with new methods, but also to study entirely new questions.
The seminar introduces students to different aspects of this “big data revolution”. It comprises theoretical sessions in which discuss the implications such as the societal and scientific opportunities and challenges of new forms of data and methods (from social media, communications platforms, Internet of Things devices, sensors/wearables, and mobile phones, digitized old data records, machine learning). In addition, it comprises lab sessions in which we learn – hands-on – how such new forms of data can be captured, curated, and analyzed using computational methods. Students apply what they have learned in their own projects.

Multilevel modeling is used when observations on the individual level are nested in units of one or more higher levels (e.g. students in classes in schools). The course will cover the logic of multilevel modeling, its statistical background, and implementation with Stata (and R). Applications will come from international comparative research treating countries as the higher level units. Data from the International Social Survey Program and the PIONEUR project (on intra-European migration) serve as examples. However, students are also encouraged to bring their own data.

Surveys are a major data source for quantitative social science research. This graduate-level course will teach the fundamentals of questionnaire design for social science surveys. The course covers theoretical models of answering survey questions, the process of developing questions, and methods to evaluate the quality of questions. A special focus of the course will be on discussing sources of error that may be introduced by question design decisions. For illustration purposes and exercise, the course will draw on questions from large-scale surveys such as the German General Survey (ALLBUS), European Social Survey (ESS), European Values Study (EVS), and the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP).

The seminar will be held live on Zoom in FSS 22 initially (expected until 08.04.2022).

Content:

This seminar will provide an introduction how to use R, a powerful programming language that is often used for statistical analyses, simulations, and cognitive modeling. The seminar first will provide a thorough introduction covering the core functionality such as objects, functions, data management, and plotting.
 
The last sessions of the seminar will address how to perform specific statistical analyses in R such as:
* Generalized linear mixed models with lme4 (also known as hierarchical
models)
* Simple structural equation models
* Basic set-up of Monte-Carlo simulations
* Simple cognitive modeling (e.g., signal detection or multinomial processing trees)
 
It is planned that participants practice R in homework assignments and work on small group projects such as analyzing own data, replicating a paper, or running a small simulation.

During recent years interventions using diary methods became increasingly popular within several fields of psychology, including health psychology and organizatinal psychology. These interventions use „intensive longitudinal designs“ to apply the treatment and to assess the data and build on daily-survey approaches that aim at „capturing life as it is lived” (Bolger, Davis, Rafaeli, 2003, p. 579). Frequent assessments typically implemented in daily-survey approaches allow for modeling change in affect, attitude, and behavior over time.

In this course we will discuss the nature of diary interventions, the research options they offer, as well as potential problems and challenges.

Diese Lehrveranstaltung findet – unabhängig von der Regelung an der Gesamtuniversität – als Online-Veranstaltung statt

Das Seminar findet im FSS 22 zunächst (voraussichtlich bis 08.04.2022) live auf Zoom statt. Eine Aufzeichnung ist aufgrund des interaktiven Charakters der Veranstaltung nicht erlaubt aber ergänzende Kursmaterialien (Folien etc.) werden auf ILIAS zur Verfügung gestellt.

Inhalt:

Wie können wir auch im höheren Erwachsenenalter kognitiv fit bleiben? In diesem Seminar evaluieren wir ausgehend von einer Monographie von Hertzog et al. (2008), ergänzt um die Recherche aktueller Studien, verschiedene Einflüsse und Inverventionsmöglichkeiten auf die kognitive Leistungsfähigkeit im Alter: Kognitives Training, mental-stimulierende Alltagsaktivitäten, körperliche Aktivität, soziales Engagement und psychische einflüsse (Stresserleben, persönliche Einstellungen).

Das Seminar findet im FSS 22 zunächst (voraussichtlich bis 08.04.2022) live auf Zoom statt. 

Inhalt:

Musik fasziniert uns und sie begleitet uns täglich – ob als Hintergrundmusik im Restaurant, als Motivation beim Lernen oder als emotionale Begleitung im Film. Doch was bewirkt Musik eigentlich? Wie nehmen wir sie wahr, wie reagieren wir auf sie und warum haben wir bestimmte Präferenzen? Welche Rolle spielt Musik in jungen Jahren und was kann Musik im Alter leisten? Und macht es eigentlich einen Unterschied, ob wir Musik hören oder Musik machen? Diesen Fragen wird im Rahmen des Seminars anhand ausgewählter Lehrbuchtexte und aktueller Literatur nachgegangen. Die Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmer erarbeiten dabei spezifische Themen und gestalten jeweils eine Sitzung selbst. Im Fokus steht die Beschäftigung mit kognitionspsychologischen Fragestellungen der Musik, die in gemeinsamen Diskussionen vertieft wird.

Die Studierenden erlernen im Seminar die Besonderheiten von Psychotherapie im gerontopsychiatrischen Kontext. Nach der Vermittlung von theoretischem Basiswissen werden praktische Fähigkeiten wie der Umgang mit kognitiven Testverfahren oder die Anpassung von Interventions- und Gesprächsführungstechniken an die Gruppe von Patient*innen im Alter von über 65 Jahren erprobt.

Das Seminar findet im FSS 22 zunächst (voraussichtlich bis 08.04.2022) digital live auf Zoom statt.

Inhalt:

Diese Veranstaltung widmet sich ausgewählten Problemstellungen, Theorien, Methoden und Ergebnissen der Medienpsychologie: Diese werden von den Studierenden im Laufe des Semesters erarbeitet und im Seminar vorgestellt und exemplifiziert. Jeder Vorstellung schließt sich eine gemeinsame Diskussion an, in der die vorgetragenen Inhalte in der Geschichte und der aktuellen Situation der Medienpsychologie kontextualisiert werden.