Tags
GED, ID, PSc
Admissions requirements
One of the following courses: Introduction to Comparative Politics, Decision-Making Processes, Comparative Party Systems.
For questions about prerequisites, please contact the course instructor.
Description
Anti-corruption policies have received extensive attention in the media, public policy circles, international organizations and the academia over the past two decades. While the extent of this attention has varied significantly during this time period, institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have devoted significant resources to promoting various types of policy responses to counter political or bureaucratic corruption. In most of the specialized policy circles and literature, anti-corruption strategies have therefore become an integral part of issues belonging to the quality of governance or economic development.
As a result of these international trends, countries around the world have incorporated anti-corruption policies and mechanisms to various degrees, while embedding them through a broad array of institutional set-ups in their existing institutional design. The goal of this course is to pursue the most relevant questions pertaining to anti-corruption policies in a theoretically and empirically rigorous manner. To this end, it will seek to engage students with the following questions: what does “efficiency” mean in respect to anti-corruption policies?; what are the factors influencing what type of anti-corruption strategy a country adopts?; what explains the saliency or success of anti-corruption policies?; how do anti-corruption policies interact with existing national policy environments?
The course will link policy analysis with elements of institutional design and it will also often contrast the challenges of designing anti-corruption policy with other types of public policies. In the process students will also become exposed to the key theoretical and empirical issues in the study of political corruption and they will have the opportunity to conduct an empirically driven policy lab project.
Course objectives
Upon completion of the course, students will be expected to successfully:
Characterize the micro-foundational challenges of designing effective anti-corruption policy,
Analyze public policy through the applied lens of anti-corruption policies,
Utilize theoretical and empirical tools to design, analyze and evaluate the political and social context of public policies.
Timetable
Once available, timetables will be published here.
Mode of instruction
Class sessions will be primarily structured in a seminar format, with presentations by the instructor when necessary. Interactive group work and exercises will form an integral part of classroom activities.
Assessment
The assessment for this course includes the following components:
Class participation, 15%
Public platform contributions (blog entries), 15% each (for a total of 2)
Data analysis project, 25%
Policy Lab: final group project, 30%
Blackboard
There will be a Blackboard site available for this course. Students will be enrolled at least one week before the start of classes.
Reading list
The reading material for this course will consist of academic articles published in scholarly journals. A full reading list will be included in the course syllabus.
Registration
This course is open to LUC students and LUC exchange students. Registration is coordinated by the Curriculum Coordinator. Interested non-LUC students should contact course.administration@luc.leidenuniv.nl.
Contact
You can contact the course instructor at the following email address: d.m.branduse@luc.leidenuniv.nl