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The seminar module offers a more extensive and more thorough analysis of a topic from within political science. To this end, the seminar module provides an overview and a critical discussion of the literature and the issues relevant for the topic of the seminar.
After completing the course, students should be able to:
1. Give an account of selected topics and theories within traditional political science fields and biology (behavior genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology).
2. Compare the application of biological theories and traditional political science theories on topics within the public policy literature and identify the theories similarities, differences, strengths and weaknesses.
3. Evaluate the theories validity based on as well existing as new empirical data.
4. Independently apply theories from biology to topics within the political science literature and evaluate the fruitfulness hereof.
5. Formulate theoretical arguments and empirical observations in a clear language.
Across disciplines there is a growing awareness of the importance of biology in understanding human behavior. Political science is no longer an exception to this development. Political scientists have, for example shown that individual variation in political ideology not just reflect differences in socialization experiences but also genetic differences; that political attitudes emerge less from cold rational considerations and more from a range of basic neural and physiological processes; and that our species' biological past as hunters and gatherers influence the way we reason about present political issues. These new insights have exciting implications for the analysis of a range of topics within political science. At the same time, however, this new knowledge also confronts actual policy makers with new challenges.
The goal of this seminar is to provide the participants with a cutting-edge introduction to these developing fields of knowledge. First, the seminar will explore how knowledge from the biological science enables us to answer deep questions that traditionally have perplexed political researchers. A core message is that Aristotle was right in claiming that humans are, by nature, political animals. A range of the social challenges, which evolution has designed us to handle, resemble the political challenges we discuss today. At the same time, however, the recent research demonstrate that our evolutionary heritage incline us to think about this challenges in a particular way and we shall see how genetic, neurological and evolutionary processes reveal themselves in relation to ideology, social trust, war, citizens' identification with political parties, candidate evaluation, and citizens' attitudes towards immigrants, criminal justice and redistribution.
Second, the seminar will explore the dilemmas confronting policy makers when they try to react to the potentials and pitfalls emerging with this new knowledge. Ethical issues linked to any intervention in the brain include questions of informed consent, stigma and labeling, privacy and personal autonomy, incidental findings, response sensitivity, clinical validity, safety, and cost. Moreover, the move of neuroethics to policy domain complicates the context by bringing to the forefront political considerations and divisions that place the dialogue and resolution of these issues in the milieu of interest group politics. The brain sciences, then, raise significant policy issues, both in the domestic and foreign policy realms. Moreover, contentious commercial applications such as lie detection, that are already being marketed, will likely be followed by pressures to use brain scans as a screening devices for job and school applicants in the near future. What, if any, regulation should there be on use of brain imaging for commercial purposes? What limitations, if any, should be placed on the marketing of nootropics? On the use of psychotropic drugs by children? On virtual reality? We will also discuss the substantial resource allocation questions surrounding brain intervention and access to the expanding array of potentially costly techniques.
The approach of the seminar is multidisciplinary and the participants will be introduced to core themes in evolutionary psychology, ethology, behavior genetics and neuroscience. The aim of the course is to enable the participants to acquire this multidisciplinary knowledge and, at the same time, enable them to use it actively. To support this aim, the course is based on a mixture of short lectures from the teachers, presentations by the participants and plenum discussion.
Public Policy/Comparative Politics
Of the nine seminars the student has to pass as part of the MA degree, at least six seminar modules have to be in political science
Michael Bang Petersen and Robert Blank
The assessment method is 7-days home assignment .
External examiner/Graded marking.
The seminar module requires active participation of students. At the beginning of the seminar module the lecturer and the students agree on specific "activity requirements" that the students have to fulfill.
The aim of the course is to enable the participants to acquire multidisciplinary knowledge and, at the same time, enable them to use it actively. To support this aim, the course is based on a mixture of short lectures from the teachers, presentations by the participants and plenum discussion.
The module compendium consists of about 1,200 pages.
Examples of literature include:
Alford, John R., Carolyn L. Funk & John R. Hibbing. 2005. "Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?", American Political Science Review, 99, 2, pp. 153-167.
Árnason, G. 2010. "Neuroimaging, Uncertainty, and the Problem of Dispositions", Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 19, pp. 188-95.
Blank, Robert H. 2007. "Policy Implications of the New Neuroscience", Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 18, 2 pp. 168-79.
Blank, Robert H., and Samuel Hines. Biology and Political Science, London: Routledge Press.
de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured. The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Giordano, J.J., & B. Gordijn, eds., 2010. Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics . Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press.
Petersen, Michael Bang. 2009, "Public Opinion and Evolved Heuristics: The Role of Category-Based Inference", Journal of Cognition and Culture , 9(3-4), 315-337.
Racine, Eric, 2010. Pragmatic Neuroethics: Improving Treatment and Understanding of the Mind-Brain, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Tooby, John & Leda Cosmides. 1992. "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind (pp. 19-135), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zak, Paul J. 2007. "The Neuroeconomics of Trust", in Roger Frantz (Ed.), Two Minds. Intuition and Analysis in the History of Economic Thought , London: Springer.
