CIVICA ESR
COURSE CATALOGUE

Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Fall 2026 seminar series) ----- October 19th 2026 12:45-2:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Commemorative practices shape collective understandings of legitimate authority, identity, and political violence, and governments routinely use them to impose majority narratives at the expense of minorities. We introduce the concept of commemorative exclusion—state commemoration that privileges the majority group's narrative while rendering minority experiences invisible—and argue that it provokes political backlash among minorities by heightening identity salience and perceptions of discrimination. We test this using Turkiye's practice of naming public schools after Turkish citizens killed in the ongoing conflict with Kurdish insurgents. Using a difference-in-differences design with granular administrative and electoral data, we show that school namings increase pro-Kurdish party support and turnout in the Kurdish region. ----- BIO: Gizem Arikan is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. Her main fields of study are political psychology and political attitudes, with focus on religiosity, authoritarian values, democratic attitudes and attitudes towards immigration.
Teachers:

• Gizem Arikan ()

The course will start with classical limitations of cross-sectional observational regressions, especially unobserved heterogeneity and reverse causality, and will present different methods to overcome these limitations and to improve the identification of the causal parameter of interest. It will especially insist on fixed effect regressions, difference-in-difference estimators, event-study, regression discontinuity design and instrumental variables. The course will take place on the following dates: Monday January 11th. 10-13:00; Thursday January 14th. 10-13:00; Monday January 18th. 10-13:00; Thursday January 21st. 10-13:00
Teachers:

• Olivier Godechot (Sciences Po)

Entry requirements: It is recommended for CIVICA students joining the course online to be fluent in R. They should also be able to use their own laptop equipped with R and R studio.
Assessment: Validation based on attendance and participation. Students will be invited to apply the taught methods on their personal data and to send the results to the professor.