The information on this page may be updated, the final version will be available on 1 June.
Admission requirements
Prerequisites for participation in the Bachelor Seminars are successful completion of the propaedeutic phase of the programme (first year). Having attended the bachelor’s course on Qualitative Research Methods is strongly desirable, although not mandatory.
Enrollment as an exchange student is only permitted if you are a third-year BSc student and have passed at least 60 EC in Political Science and/or International Relations courses.
Description
In this course, we will discuss seminal accounts of the origins and evolution of Latin America’s state and regime institutions. Students interested in economic development, democratization, political violence, and criminality will find this course of interest, as the modern state’s institutions have substantial consequences for nations’ economic trajectory and governments’ ability to guarantee peace and civic liberty within their territories.
The students will learn to engage with historically oriented comparative politics through questions like the following. Why did Latin American countries build weaker states than Europe and the US? What countries of the region are more developed and why? Why is Latin America the most unequal region in the world? Why have the democracies of the region been historically so vulnerable and ephemeral? Where and why did ethnic conflict appear in the past decades?
The syllabus focuses on seminal discussions and agenda-setting publications in the study of “how temporal processes and events influence the origin and transformation of institutions that govern political and economic relations” in Latin America. The syllabus draws from the “historical institutionalism” tradition in political science and sociology, and especially “Comparative Historical Analysis”. The latter refers to “historically contextualized comparisons explicitly aimed at producing causal arguments” about macro-political processes. These traditions are mostly qualitative but are increasingly in dialog with quantitatively oriented political science, like the political economy of development. Thus, students interested in qualitative and quantitative research might find this seminar useful.
The students will practice “thinking like social scientists” by refining a research question about a topic of their interest with the instructor’s assistance and writing a review of existing research focused on possible answers to their question.
Course objectives
At the end of the course, the student will be able to:
- Understand how qualitatively oriented comparative politics scholars think about the origins and development of modern state institutions in Latin America, the kinds of questions they ask, and how they address these questions.
- Recognize and craft questions amenable to research, search and identify relevant social sciences publications, and stylize alternative answers to a question into hypotheses.
Schedule
The timetables are available through MyTimetable (see the button in the upper right corner).
Teaching method
Seminar discussions, group presentations, and short lectures. This is a discussion-based course, so reading before class and in-class participation are essential. The instructor will introduce the subject each week and engage with the group to analyze the assigned reading, often with the help of student presentations.
Assessment method
The final grade is a weighted combination of the following elements:
10% Participation
20% In-class evaluations and quizzes
20% Group presentation
15% Midterm Assignment
35% Final Assignment
Resit, review & feedback
No resits available, as no component is worth 50% of the grade.
Reading list
The reading list consists of articles or book chapters available through the library or that will be provided in Brightspace.
Registration
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer(s) (listed in the right information bar). For questions about enrolment, contact the Student Services Centre: ssc@leiden.edu.