BSc Theses Political Connections

Introduction

In short, this theme will allow you to:

• Get to know the main literature about political connections.
• Understand the main theories about political connections and political interference with business and markets.
• Understand the difference between empirical and theoretical questions, and identify the main methods used in empirical research.
• Formulate your own ideas about political connections
• Get an impression of the variation of mechanisms around the world to regulate politicians’ behavior.

Secondarily, the goal is to introduce students to the main aspects of doing data analysis and statistics. I think these skills are some of the most broadly applicable skills that you can learn in your academic trajectory. Whatever you will do later in life, these skills are both highly marketable and wanted in a huge number of fields, including academia and business. To this end, you will learn how to do the following:

• Collect data from various sources
• Identify issues and problems
• Solving these problems!
• Doing statistical analysis independently using one of several programming languages.

Syllabus

The syllabus for the theme can be found in the first repository here

Course Contents

The body of the course is provided in the second repository. The links provided contain a description of Lecture Slides and Walkthroughs including Videos (in Dutch), describing how to collect and curate data for some particular research questions.