Over the last decade democracy around the world has been under pressure, with democracy levels on average declining. At the same time the world has hit a sad record of more than fifty armed conflicts per year worldwide and is still struggling to tackle poverty and climate change. May there be a link?
To answer this and related questions, this course starts off by investigating how democratic decision making works and what types of factors and mechanisms can bias decisions. Building on these insights, we next study how particular institutions can arise and why they matter.
We shall discuss cutting-edge empirical evidence on how democratic governance fares. It will be shown that there is a strong case for democracy to be a powerful antidote against international and civil conflicts, and that there is solid evidence linking democracy to development and socio-economic outcomes such as health and social norms. We wrap up this course by discussing to what extent stronger democratic governance can contribute to tackling global warming and environmental degradation.
The course draws on both classic and very recent cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work in economics, political science and beyond. The exposition is non-technical and accessible for students with backgrounds from various disciplines.
- Teacher: Dominic Rohner
- Teacher: Dominic Rohner
- Teacher: Feiyang Shi