POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (ENGLISH, PHD)
PhD	TR-NQF-HE: Level 8	QF-EHEA: Third Cycle	EQF-LLL: Level 8

Course Introduction and Application Information

Course Code	Course Name	Semester	Theoretical	Practical	Credit	ECTS
POL6031	Elector Behavior Research	Fall Spring	3	0	3	12

This catalog is for information purposes. Course status is determined by the relevant department at the beginning of semester.

Basic information

Language of instruction:	English
Type of course:	Departmental Elective
Course Level:
Mode of Delivery:	Face to face
Course Coordinator :	Assoc. Prof. ESRA ALBAYRAKOĞLU
Course Lecturer(s):	Prof. Dr. YILMAZ ESMER
Recommended Optional Program Components:	none
Course Objectives:	This course serves students with an interest in political communication and cognition; comparative politics; voting behavior and public opinion; empirical democratic theory and comparative political economy; and the methodology of quantitative research. It focuses on how citizens, with their limited resources and time available for engaging with politics, perform their role as ultimate decision-makers in democratic politics.

Learning Outcomes

The students who have succeeded in this course;
will earn following abilities:
Familiarity with theories, concepts, empirical regularities and research strategies in political behavior research
Ability to conceive, elaborate and defend campaign tools with reference to what scholarly analyses reveal about voting behavior and public opinion
Reason analytically, applying abstract models to complex empirical situations and engage with different intellectual traditions, subfields, research designs and methodologies in the social sciences
Improved ability to design high quality original academic or applied research in a rigorous and consistent manner

Course Content

The course will ask how social cleavages, economic conditions, ideology, political issues, party identification, factual information, campaigns and various other factors impact on how voters decide, and what all this implies for the quality of democracy and citizen influence on public policy.

Weekly Detailed Course Contents

Week	Subject	Related Preparation
1)	The rationality assumption in political research and its alternatives
2)	The instrumental rationality assumption in survey research and the emergence of the “sociological” and “psychological” models as empirically-motivated alternatives
3)	Reinterpreting the impact of partisanship, ideology and social group membership as cue-taking
4)	Motivational and cognitive accounts of party identification
5)	Quasi-rational response-stimulus models of the electoral process
6)	Cognitive and motivational limits to self-interested behavior in mass politics
7)	Review of the course
8)	Do elections give mandates to enact specific policies?
9)	How do voters relate information and policy preferences to vote choice?
10)	The long road from minimal to massive media effect theories in communication research
11)	The impact of public opinion and elections on governments and policy choices in democracies
12)	Do voters have positional policy preferences after all? How are they structured?
13)	Taking stock and outlook to the state of the art
14)	Review of the course

Sources

Course Notes / Textbooks:

Helena Catt Voting Behaviour: A Radical Critique (London, Leicester University Press, 1996)
Patrick Dunleavy "Political Behavior: Institutional and
Experimental Approaches", in A New Handbook in Political Science, ed. by Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 276-93)
pp. 202-12 of David Broughton's Public Opinion Polling and Politics in Britain (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995) and pp. 1-26 of David Denver's Elections and Voting Behaviour in Britain(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2nd ed. 1994).
Bartels, Larry M. 2008. "The Study of Electoral Behavior."
Borgida, Eugene, Christopher M. Federico, and John L. Sullivan, eds. 2009. The Political
Psychology of Democratic Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eijk, Cees van der, and Mark Franklin. 2009. Elections and Voters. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, Jocelyn A.J. 2004. Voters and Voting: An Introduction. London: Sage.
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, ed. 2009. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Andre, Blais. 2010. "Making Electoral Democracy Work." Electoral Studies 29 (1): 169-170.
Thomassen, Jacques, ed. 2005. The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References:

Evaluation System

Semester Requirements	Number of Activities	Level of Contribution
Attendance	14	% 20
Homework Assignments	2	% 20
Final	1	% 60
Total		% 100
PERCENTAGE OF SEMESTER WORK		% 40
PERCENTAGE OF FINAL WORK		% 60
Total		% 100

ECTS / Workload Table

Activities	Number of Activities	Workload
Course Hours	14	42
Application	14	56
Study Hours Out of Class	14	77
Total Workload		175

Contribution of Learning Outcomes to Programme Outcomes

No Effect	1 Lowest	2 Low	3 Average	4 High	5 Highest

	Program Outcomes	Level of Contribution
1)	Grasp advanced theoretical and conceptual knowledge about the field and the dynamic relations between them at the level of practice.
2)	Possess advanced knowledge about the causes and effects of political transformations in societies.
3)	Possess knowledge about quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods in Social and Behavioral Sciences.
4)	Possess the skill to use field-related advanced knowledge in decision-making and implementation.
5)	Communicate with ease the theoretical and practical implications of their innovative ideas, techniques, designs and/or practices to related audience.
6)	Contribute innovative ideas, techniques, designs and practices to the field professionally, either independently or as a team member.
7)	Publish in national and/or international peer-reviewed scholarly journals either independently or as a team member.
8)	Organize various activities and projects related to the field.
9)	Follow contemporary scholarly publications related to the field.
10)	Recognize the gaps in the field as regards theory and practice.
11)	Communicate with peers both orally and in writing, by using a foreign language at least at a level of European Language Portfolio C1 General Level and the necessary informatics and communication technologies.
12)	Establish an effective dialogue with experts demonstrating their field-related competence.
13)	Possess competence to interpret the new political actors, theories and concepts in a global era.
14)	Contribute solutions to field-related social, scientific, cultural and ethical problems at the national and international levels.