Teaching

The annual introductory lecture on German Politics plays a central role in our teaching. The lecture introduces students to concepts and methods of comparative politics and applies them to the German case. The lecture continuously takes up state-of-the-art research on Germany, prominently featuring reseach by members of the department. As a result, students learn the difference between journalistic and political science analyses at an early stage of their studies. As the German case is repeatedly compared to other European democracies, students are also able to understand at an early stage which characteristics of the German system are special and which are typical of parliamentary and federal democracies.

In addition to the lecture, our working group regularly offers seminars on democracy research, party competition, federalism and multi-level politics, representation or migration and integration policy.

In addition to our content-related teaching focus, the working group is also involved in qualitative methods training (with the lecture "Research Design II Qualitative" in the MA program as well as seminars in which, for example, expert interviews or qualitative content analysis are presented as a method). Christina also teaches a PhD course on causal inference with observational data as part of the Konstanzer Methoden-Exzellenz-Workshops (Komex).