Politics, Governance and Public Policy

Core modules:

Analysing the Policy Process

The term 'governance' has become widely used in debates in Political Science, Public Policy and International relations - often to mean very different things.

You will be introduced to the term's nature, meaning and significance. Governance's central concern is with how societies are being, and can be, steered in an increasingly complex world where states must interact with and influence other actors and institutions to achieve results.

You will investigate and gain an understanding of political power and the functioning of policy processes, including applying analytical tools and concepts that enable understanding of policy making as an inherently political process.

30 credits

Understanding Politics

The purpose of this course is to provide students with some of the knowledge and tools required to understand and analyse politics.

We will begin by examining some of the underlying principles related to how we study and understand politics, while simultaneously looking at three key levels of analysis; states, institutions, and individuals.

This module will also place strong emphasis on developing students' reading, writing, debating, and research skills in relation to the study of politics through a series of practical lectures and seminars.

15 credits

Research and Dissertation Preparation

This module will prepare you for writing your dissertation. The dissertation takes up 60 of your available 180 credits and therefore is a significant part of the degree.

You will be introduced to the nature of the research process and will be encouraged to focus on developing a research question and methodology which will shape your full dissertation.

You will develop your research retrieval skills and undertake a literature search to underpin the full dissertation. This module will also introduce you to the supervision process.

15 credits

Politics Dissertation

You will complete a 10,000 word dissertation, under the direction of an academic supervisor, on a topic of your choice relating to an aspect of your studies in the MA programme. The dissertation gives you an opportunity to explore an area of interest in depth.

To achieve a master standard, you are required to demonstrate an up-to-date critical understanding of your chosen topic, as well as undertake advanced political analysis of the dissertation's subject matter.

You will develop the ability to conduct independent research and employ varying methods of analysis, involving the use of evidence to evaluate different theoretical approaches.

60 credits

Optional modules:

Democratic Governance in the 21st Century: Problems, Innovations and Solutions

Political systems around the world drive to be democratic, but what is meant by democracy and how can this be achieved?

During this module, you will consider the nature of the democratic crisis faced by countries around the world and map the latest innovations designed to address this challenge. You will study the tensions between new and old democratic arenas and consider the indicators of a thriving democracy.

Your work will be grounded in the tradition of engaged scholarship, will use real world examples and will culminate in a solution focused analysis. By the end, you will have developed keen professional and research skills by studying the theory and practice of democratic innovation.

30 credits

Policy-Making in the Real World

Policy making is an increasingly complex process, involving a range of 'wicked problems' and a growing set of options for addressing them. Given the multiple risks and crises they must deal with, how can policy makers come up with effective policy, learn from mistakes and deal with unexpected events? What tools can they employ to do so and how can we evaluate their success or failure?

You will take a theoretically informed but practice-focused approach to these questions. You will consider topics such as how technological innovation will inform policy making, looking at the impact of big data and AI, and considering the standards that should apply to such tools.  

Throughout the module, you will practice a range of practical skills through innovative group projects and visiting speakers from the policy world.

30 credits

Wellbeing in Politics and Policy

There has been a dramatic rise in political interest in wellbeing over the past decade. Politicians and policy-makers in a range of contexts - national and international - have moved towards embracing wellbeing as a more comprehensive, inclusive and appropriate goal of public policy than the traditionally narrow focus on indicators of economic prosperity. This has led to the development of wellbeing frameworks that embrace indicators of subjective wellbeing (e.g., happiness), environmental and social concerns alongside economic indicators. For some these developments have the potential to transform aspects of politics and policy in the long term. This module explores conceptual, empirical and policy-related aspects of wellbeing. It examines competing definitions, understandings and measurements of wellbeing and related concepts such as quality of life and happiness. It aims to give students a clear understanding of how and why wellbeing has risen up political agendas, the significance of developments in policy to date and the potential for wellbeing as a political idea and guide to policy.

30 credits

Political Economy of Global Environmental change

Global environmental politics grapples with the key issues that shape the survival of life on Earth in the future.  Climate collapse, biodiversity loss, pandemics and pollution are just some of the problems that shape our everyday lives. Tackling them is an increasingly urgent agenda for international organisations, governments, NGOs and the wider public. To understand the origins of, the drivers of and the possible solutions to environmental degradation we need to examine them not just as matters of science, but also as wide ranging social, political, economic and cultural issues. 

In this course, you will be introduced to the major debates in the political economy of the environment. 

You will examine central debates around climate change, the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, biodiversity loss, population, environment-conflict dynamics and human-animal relations. You will also discuss the potentials and pitfalls of different 'green' solutions such as degrowth, renewables, geoengineering, Nature Based Solutions, protected areas and green economy. You will explore these debates by analysing the different approaches to tackling global environmental change and use case studies to illuminate wider conceptual debates.

30 credits

Contemporary Global Security

You will explore the changing character of contemporary global (in)security. Throughout, you will examine the proliferation of discourses and practices of security and threat in contemporary society, to encompass issues as wide ranging as climate change, migration, technology and human rights. In doing so, you will trace the evolution of security studies from a narrow sub-discipline focused on inter-state war and the military security of the nation-state, to one increasingly willing to question and challenge its own assumptions. The module invites you to think critically about the function of 'security', and to reflect on the ethical and analytical assumptions that shape how security is thought about, theorised, and practiced in International Relations.

You will be introduced to a range of advanced theoretical lenses and debates about security, exploring key concepts in security studies and how they might help us to make sense of security politics. As part of this, we will apply these debates to understand and analyse real world problems that are or might be considered issues of security, through case studies on issues such as terrorism, nuclear weapons, energy security, climate change, technology and development. 

You practice your ability to think critically about how you make sense of contemporary global security politics, as well as how we might think and practice security differently, exploring both the possibilities for change and the limits of security.

30 credits

Global Health and Global Politics

Situated within contemporary approaches to International Relations and International Political Economy, this module will introduce you to the global politics of health, addressing health as both a global issue, and also as a quintessentially political one.

During this module, you will chart the recent rise of health as an issue of 'high politics', examine the relationship between individual and population health and the global political economy, explore the ways in which institutions by which health is governed at the global level, and analyse some of the key contemporary issues and challenges in contemporary global health governance. In doing so, we will be applying a variety of different 'lenses' (including feminist, decolonial and human rights-based approaches) to understand how these might affect what are seen as global health priorities - and what should be done about them.

Through the seminars and assessments, students on the module will further develop a variety of different skills including the analysis of issues from different perspectives, writing for policy and other non-academic audiences, presentation skills, and working as part of a team.

30 credits

Terrorism and Political Violence

This module aims to provide an advanced level of understanding with reference to the topics of terrorism and political violence. It is organised around a framework of analysing both 'Terrorism' and political violence more broadly, both as events in the world, and as essentially political phenomena, whose effects have, in large part, to do with how they are politically defined and responded to.  

One way of thinking about this module is that it takes a critical theory approach to terrorism and political violence. Instead of a traditional, or 'problem solving' approach, which takes 'Terrorism' as a pre-defined problem in the world and our goal to develop solutions to it, this class begins by critically interrogating the way that 'terrorism' has been constructed as a way of understanding some types of political violence and not others. This critical approach then runs throughout the module and shapes our approach to the causes of terrorism and the forms of counterterrorism. Combining and applying Sociological and International Relations approaches, you will conduct a critical analysis on security and violence using a variety of cases ranging from 'macro-level' (war, including guerrilla warfare/insurgency, genocide and terrorism) through to 'micro-level' sites usually considered 'private' or 'intimate' ('domestic' violence, white supremacist bombings of historical Black churches, etc.). Moving beyond a narrow understanding of terrorism as limited to sub-state violence, you will also study the state as a perpetrator of political violence, both at home and abroad, and the role of gender, sexuality, and race in producing images of the terrorist. 

By the end of this module, you will therefore not only have dicussed critical understandings of terrorism, but also explored the ways in which it has effects in the world, which are often by shaping the ways that states and other actors respond to it as a threat, more so than through specific violent acts themselves.

30 credits

Capitalism and Crisis

During this module, you will explore the relationship between capitalism and crisis through the prism of the causes of, and fallout from, the 2008 crash.

You will unpack the core concepts of the module - capitalism and crisis - and gain a brief historical overview of pre-2008 economic crises to contextualise and compare the main content of the module. You shall then go on to survey competing explanations of the 2008 crisis, by starting narrow (i.e. regulation of banking) and then broadening out (i.e. evolution of capitalism).

By the end of the module, you will have examined the economic and political fallout of  the 2008 crisis, be able to debate the extent to which the crisis was truly global, and discuss the variety of political responses to the crash.

30 credits

Development and the State

You will explore and critically assess the political economy of development by focusing on the interplay between processes of economic transformation and the political strategies pursued by states in the name of national development. This is an interdisciplinary module, asking you to draw on development studies, the political economy of growth and transformation, and comparative capitalisms.

To begin, you will review the most salient theoretical themes in approaches to capitalist development. This will put you in a position to understand more specific theorisations of capitalist development as a state strategy in a world characterised by uneven and combined capitalist development. You will then shift your focus more specifically to the state, bringing the more generic issues reviewed at the start of the module into a focused 'developmental' framing. 

By the end of the module, you will be able to undertake ambitious evaluative work in which normative questions are asked and the prospects for capitalist development are considered.

30 credits

Freedom

Freedom is one of the most important political values, if not the most important one of all. During this module, you will investigate the political value of freedom by engaging with the literature in contemporary political theory.

To do so, you will focus on: competing theories of freedom (negative, positive, republican); the relationship between freedom and other values (autonomy, equality, security); and a number of applied issues (the harm principle, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement). 

Taking a theoretical and philosophical approach, this module will encourage you to use the tools needed to analyse and evaluate political arguments which invoke the value of freedom.

30 credits

The Governance and Politics of the European Union

During this module, you will examine the history and development of the European Union, together with the institutions and decision-making processes of the community.

You will also investigate various theoretical perspectives on the process of bringing European countries closer together through economic, political, and social cooperation - a process known as European integration. When evaluating this process, you will focus on selected policy sectors, ranging from the single market and monetary union to budget and cohesion policy and foreign, security and defence policy.

This module will help you develop a range of skills. These include, but are not limited to, the skills to discover, understand and create academic work, engage in small group discussions in seminars, coherently analyse the ideas of others and critically engage with those ideas, and engage with key regional and global issues and contexts.

30 credits