Course Description
This course offers an integrated and hands-on introduction to European Political Economy (EPE) and R - no prior knowledge of either is required. EPE is a subfield of political science at the intersection of comparative and international political economy and European Union studies. R is a free and open-source programming language for statistical computing and graphics. The point behind teaching both in one course is to allow students to get the best of both worlds. On the one hand, they will get a good sense for how to actually do European political economy research: how to get data, how to bring them in the right shape, how to visualize them, and how to analyze them in basic ways. On the other hand, students will get a practical but also substantively interesting introduction to R. After basic introductions to both EPE and R, we will have 2 substantive blocks on the political economy of climate change and economic security respectively. In both blocks, we will first read general political economy scholarship, then discuss related work on the EU specifically, and finally, in third session, try to redo some of analyses in the papers in R or learn about new things in R using similar data or approaches. The goal is not full replication, but learning, in principle, how to get EPE data, transform them, and use them to address substantively important questions. The course concludes with a basic introduction to Quarto which helps prepare students for writing their final papers.
