210073 SE BAK11: European Union and Europeanisation (2023S)

Students are required to attend classes and come prepared. Three assignments will make up their final grade (their will be no student presentations). The first assignment needs to be done by every student themselves, whereas the second and third assignment can also be done in groups of two.

• The first assignment consists of two in-depth response papers on two of the four substantive readings in the second half of the class. These reflection papers should be between 600 and 800 words and will make up 20% of the overall grade. Students are expected carefully reflect on the approaches taken in the studies we read, criticize their theoretical or empirical shortcomings, and briefly sketch an alternative way of answering the same questions or a follow-up study that builds on or complements the original study.

• The second assignment consists of 4 short and basic coding tasks that requires students to import, transform, and visualize data related to the various substantive areas we cover. This, too, will make up 20% of their overall grade. Assignments will be administered through Posit Cloud (formerly RStudio Cloud). While there will be a mandatory assignment after the block introduction to R, students can skip one of the four assignments for the coding sessions of the 4 thematic blocks (they can freely choose which one).

• The third assignment will be a final research paper that independently develops a CPE-related research questions and starts elaborating and answering it with data. Elaborating means that students use R to set up an empirical puzzle or potentially interesting question (e.g. by showing an interesting correlation). Answering means using visualization, descriptive analysis, or basic inferential statistics to sketch an answer or possible ways of going about answering the question more systematically. The emphasis here is less on having a fully-fledged, well-polished final paper than on demonstrating that you have understood how one would could, in principle, go about developing, theoretically grounding, and answering a CPE-related research question. Ideally, you can build on your reflection papers and coding experience from the first two assignments; and perhaps you can even build on your research paper in your B.A. thesis. This final research paper will make up 60% of your overall grade. It is meant to be between 3000-4000 words long (if you decide to write the paper with a fellow student, it should be between 5500-7000 words long). The deadline for the paper will be Friday, August 18, 2023.