Die Frage - Do parties matter?‘ - ist eine Kernfrage der vergleichenden Staatstätigkeitsforschung. Das Seminar beschäftigt sich aus vergleichender Perspektive und am Beispiel verschiedener Politikfel-der, ob und inwieweit politische Parteien bzw. Parteienfamilien einen Unterschied in der Staatstä-tigkeit machen. Behandelt werden die Felder Sozial-, Bildungs-, Wirtschafts- und Moralpolitik, die Innere Sicherheit und die Umweltpolitik. Im Zentrum stehen makro-quantitative Untersuchungen.
Voraussetzungen: Gute Statistikkenntnisse (v.a. Regressionsanalyse).
Anforderungen zum CP-Erwerb: Klausur/Hausarbeit

In most countries of the Global North functioning health systems and access to medicines is taken for granted. But in large parts of the Global South health systems depend on donor funding and access to medicines is still an unsolved problem with grave social consequences. The causes for this problem are manyfold and include poverty, limited governance capabilities, lack of infrastructure, and global trade rules that create additional obstacles to the availability of affordable medication. The course has two objectives.
1) It will provide a broad perspective on Global Health. It will introduce important institutions, actors and areas of conflict and will look at the structure of health systems in the Global North and the Global South in comparison.
2) In the second half of the course students will do independent research on health systems in Africa.

Economic inequality has been on the rise around most of the world for decades. Although it is at the root of many societal challenges, governments have put no, or few, redistributive policies into place that would counteract rising inequality. This is especially surprising in Western Democracies where public opinion and resulting electoral pressures could be expected to push governments towards such policies. At the same time, there are puzzling differences between countries. Although Europe has lower levels of inequality than the United States, Europeans are generally much more supportive of redistribution. In this course, we set out to understand these dynamics. Starting with the bigger picture, we first study how inequality and public opinion have changed in the past decades, and what implications these changes have for policy-making. We then address in detail the origins of public opinion about inequality by zooming in on what people know about inequality, when they regard it as wrong or unfair, and what kind of redistributive policies they prefer. At the end of the course, students will be able to maneuvre contemporary debates on the origins and importance of public opinion about inequality.

We will read texts that describe and theorize the incidence and emergence of social inequality. We will discuss the role that is ascribed to labour market actors, institutions and structures. Hence, we will discuss labour law, collective bargaining, labour marekt and educational policy and their effects on inequality. Our focus will not be limited to Europe, but include countries around the World. (Berg, 2015)
Reading: Berg J. (2015) Labour markets, institutions and inequality: Building just societies in the 21st century http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/books/WCMS_314464/lang--en/index.htm