The course introduces students to the theory and current issues in the study of special interest politics, discussing the most salient questions of the scholarly research:
- What are the patterns of state capture and rent-seeking patterns associated with different fields of public policy?
- How do special interests and rent-seeking affect economic development (and vice versa)?
- What are the specificities of a captured state and economy? how and what institutional specificities do facilitate and hamper rent-seeking behavior?
- How does exposure to rent-seeking transforms different political economies
The course does not require any background in economics.

Disclosure: Public choice theory has long been associated with explicit right-wing anti-statist ideological bias. The course aims at proving that it is not the case: recent critical theories of capitalism heavily rely on the concept and terminology of tent-seeking theory