Spring Semester 2013

University of Berne

Governance

We observe today changes in power structures and decision-making processes. There exists a shift from traditional and hierarchical government to multi-level governance structures.

But how to define Governance? And how do political changes impact actors, the regulation of societal problems, and last but not least, the democratic culture?

Those two questions are addressed in this lecture and illustrated through current examples in Swiss and European policies: new regulation and control mechanisms are identified; policy instrument mixes evaluated and the specifically the fields of telecommunications liberalization and environmental changes highlighted.

Lecturer: Karin Ingold

Tragedy of the Commons

This Master Seminar investigates different natural resources, the related public policies and property rights. The Tragedy of the Commons shows the dilemma when several actors use independently in their own interest natural resources. In groups of 3-4 students, the resources water, forest, air and landscape are analyzed and their sustainable use assessed. In the fist part of the seminar, property rights and regulations in Switzerland are investigated; in the second part, international agreements dealing with the four resources studied and compared.

Lecturer: Karin Ingold

Political Networks and Decision-Making: Theory, Methods, and Applications

Which interest groups are able to influence political decisions, and why? When do political parties “go public” in order to make political claims, and how successful are they? At what stage of the decision-making process do state actors try to integrate different interests, and how? These are some of the questions that we need to ask if we want to understand the mechanisms and logics of political decision-making. The seminar will first introduce the students to the main concepts and theoretical arguments. Second, we will discuss different data sources and methodological tools that allow researchers to answer these important questions. Concrete examples from different policy domains will be presented for illustration, and students will actively study a given political decision-making process.

Lecturer: Manuel Fischer

Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen

Introduction to the Statistical Computing Environment R

The statistical computing environment R has become a standard tool for  the analysis of statistical data and related tasks like simulation and  data management. The PhD-level seminar introduces the following topics:  R syntax, object structure, data import, export and manipulation,  descriptive statistics, graphics and data visualization, programming  techniques (incl. vectorization, loops, conditions and functions),  regression (OLS, logistic and hierarchical models), and other  multivariate data analysis techniques (cluster analysis,  multidimensional scaling etc.). Participants will conduct their own data  analyses either with a sample dataset or with their own data.

Lecturer: Philip Leifeld

Fall Semester 2012

University of Berne

Policy Analysis I – Processes and Instruments

This lecture is an introduction in Policy Analysis. Concretely, we address the question how societal problems become policies and get on the political agenda. Insights in policy process theories and concepts are presented with a special focus on actors’ constellations, regulatory instruments and decision-making processes.

The students get knowledge about theoretical and methodological elements in public policy analysis. Those elements are illustrated through current examples in national and international climate policy and in liberalized utility sectors.

Lecturer: Karin Ingold

Water Policy

Is Switzerland running out of water? What impact do events like Fukushima and major political decision such as the nuclear phasing out have on the Swiss water regime? Are increased flooding events due to climate change impacts?

These are current issues related to water resources and their management - clear answers are however largely missing.

How does the political system deal with this uncertainty? How is current and future water policy designed and implemented?

These issues are addressed in the seminar on "Water Policy." In the core of the seminar are the students’ presentations and plenary discussions.

The seminar is organized as follows:

• Introduction to water policy and resource-related topics
• Characteristics of Environmental Policy Analysis/ Environmental Governance
• Methodological approaches and empirical research
• Case studies on integrated water management, cross-border water agreements and climate change in mountain regions.

Lecturer: Karin Ingold

Governance of Collective Goods

“Collective goods” are goods which are publicly available and consumable and whose provision cannot be sufficiently governed by markets. Examples are a healthy environment, the provision of national defense, or the stability of financial markets. For some collective goods, there is rivalry between users because the resource is finite. Other public goods can only be provided if a sufficient number of potential users contribute to the common good, which in turn induces incentives for free-riding. For the governance of these goods, there are various institutional arrangements with different regulatory effects, for example bans, self-regulation, solutions based on market exchange, privatization, associational cooperation, and bargaining. The seminar looks at collective goods from several angles and deals with 1) theoretical foundations of collective action, 2) the comparison of different institutional arrangements, 3) game-theoretic modeling of individual decision-making, 4) experimental approaches from behavioral economics, and 5) the policy-analytic explanation of institutional arrangements in different policy domains.

Lecturer: Philip Leifeld

Applied Policy Analysis – the Case of Water Policy

What impact will the increasing use of drugs have on our waters? How does the variety of cleaning agents and detergents and cosmetics from our everyday use affect drinking water? How to deal with pesticides and industrial chemicals in rivers and lakes? How does the political system respond to the increasing concentrations of chemicals in the waters? Those issues will be tackled in this pro-seminar. Specifically, the lecture deals with the question how water pollution is regulated. Moreover, we analyze the different policy instruments addressing the issue of chemicals impacting water quality. The focus is on the question of which actors are involved in decision making, what their interests are and how they are involved in the political process. Finally, students learn how to investigate policy decisions taken by the stakeholder and how to design a social network analysis. To this end, students are introduced to the software UCINET and learn how to create questionnaires for network research.

Lecturer: Florence Metz

ETH Zurich

Environmental Governance

The course addresses environmental issues as policy problems and discusses new approaches in environmental policymaking summarized as 'environmental governance.' It introduces concepts to analyze environmental politics, explains the key features of environmental governance and provides approaches to critically assess them, using empirical examples from the local to the global political level.

Co-Lecturer: Eva Lieberherr