Lehre

The annual lecture "The German Political System" 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. This approach helps students to understand the difference between how journalists and political scientists approach politics, and enables them to learn how to identify typical mechanisms of policy-making in parliamentary, federal democracies such as Germany.

Aside from the lecture, our group regularly offers seminars on topics such as democratic backsliding, party competition, federalism and multi-level politics, representation, or migration and integration policy at all levels.

The working group also offers regular training in qualitative methods (Research Design II in the MA programme, as well as advanced BA seminars that introduce expert interviews or qualitative content analysis). Christina is also one of the instructors of the Konstanz Methods Excellence Workshops (Komex) for PhD students where she teaches a course on causal inference with observational data.