Teaching

Overview

Welcome to my Teaching portal. Here you can access a lot of information about the classes I teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I currently teach a writing-intensive seminar for juniors called Explaining Political Change. In this class, we try to answer the question: "What do we mean when we say that history matters"? We therefore analyze temporal processes in political analysis, through the eyes of various approaches such as institutional, cultural, and rational choice.

Democratic Transitions is a class that combines elements of the seminar and the lecture. This course explores democratization processes from a variety of historical and geographical perspectives through significant use of documentaries and films as well as an extensive bibliography. It examines the role of foreign influences, the economy, culture, leadership and institutions in the transition, consolidation and evolution of democratic systems.

I also teach an upper-division politics core lecture, titled Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies. In this class, we focus on institutions and policy challenges facing industrial states, with a focus on European countries. We learn about branches of government, electoral systems, and policy-making. We apply what we have learned focusing on issues like the crisis of the welfare state and immigration.

At the senior level, I teach a seminar called Substance of Democracy. Here, we study a combination of political theory, comparative politics, and election law, and try to disentangle tensions and contradictions among different conceptions to democracy.

At the graduate level, I teach a seminar titled Logics of Inquiry. This course offers a new version of the ubiquitous methods course in political science departments – a course that by focusing on applied quantitative analysis and modeling, too often puts doing before thinking. In Logics of Inquiry, instead, we try to align ontological assumptions with epistemological frameworks and, subsequently, research design. It is therefore a course that is heavy on philosophy of the social sciences, and light on mechanics – which students are encouraged to develop in later courses. The goal is for participants to gain awareness of strengths, weaknesses, and implications of the methodological approaches that they decide to employ in their research.