Program Description

The winter school aims at providing the opportunity for Ph.D. students and early career researchers to advance their knowledge on Public Policy theories, concepts and, methodologies. Students will take part in workshops where they will be able to discuss their research projects and receive feedback from both their peers and acclaimed scholars of public policy.

In the course of 5 days, selected Ph.D. students or young scholars will have the opportunity to attend the following activities:

Four hours of lectures from 4 different International scholars on specific public policy approaches, concepts, and theories

10 hours of course by an International scholar on a particular issue. This is a hybrid course.  Each group will be composed of a maximum of 10 students on-site and 5-10 online, in order to comply with the recommended physical distance between the participants

12 hours of workshop sessions together with your group, giving the students the option to present their work to the group, and have their topic being discussed by their peers and the professors. Each project will be discussed for 45 minutes to 1h.

Course Description

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a set-theoretic method for identifying necessary and/or sufficient conditions for outcomes which is increasingly used in comparative policy analysis. Its core advantages lie in modelling causal complexity and enabling systematic comparisons to identify regularities, while integrating case knowledge at all levels of analysis. This course introduces participants to the nuts and bolts of QCA and its implementation using the most powerful currently available software in R. Apart from basic knowledge of empirical social research design and methodology, no particular pre-existing knowledge is required.