Passionate about Politics: Spyros Kosmidis
We’ve asked some of our Undergraduate Politics academics, tutors and lecturers to tell us what sparked their interest in the subject, when they were students.
In the fourth instalment, we talked to Spyros Kosmidis, Departmental Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, who said reading An Economic Theory of Democracy by Anthony Downs changed his perspective.
“This is probably one of the most cited books in the social sciences. The first time I read it I was a first-year Politics student and I did not know how influential or important it was,” he said.
“Before reading this book I was frustrated with most of the readings we were assigned; they were descriptive, general, and would fail to offer a paradigm to understand elite and citizen behaviour.
“After reading Downs, everything started making sense. There was an analytical framework that could put things into place and it would let me make predictions about what I was mostly interested in; voters and parties.”
Further reading:
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