What explains outcomes? How can we think causality in policy research? In the last decades, social sciences have come to pay an increasing attention to these questions. Sociology, economics and political science have all borrowed from the debates that usually engage the philosophers of science in order to justify special methodological preferences. Such wide spread awareness has uncovered a new source of scholarly pluralism: while some agreement seems to exist on the mechanistic nature of causation, different research fields conceive and detect causes in dissimilar ways. What brings an outcome about can be understood as either an observable or an unobservable process, as either a sequence or a configuration of occurrences, as either a universal or a very local phenomenon – even limited to a single case at a special time-point. Research strategies all take a position on each issue – although sometimes implicitly. Yet, techniques are heavily constrained in their analytical capacity by the specialbeliefs about causation that they embody. The ReSPoS Summer School 2014 aims at raising researchers’ awareness about the causal beliefs embodied into different strategies for policy studies, the special research design and data treatment that they require for results to be sound, and the effects that they have on the usability of such results. In the first day, the keynote speech introduces the issue from the perspective of philosophy of science, while the following days are each designed for uncovering the causal assumptions of a special technique and their operational consequences in actual research.

   Applications

The School welcomes applications from any interested major or graduate students, or researcher. Candidates can simply send their CV and a motivation letter to respos@unimi.it before April, 30. Admissions will be communicated by e-mail before May, 11. Thanks to the support of our sponsors, they are free of charge.