A message from our Rotterdam-based colleagues:
We are very excited to announce that Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Department of Sociology will offer a new master specialisation entitled Politics & Society: Understanding Contemporary Politics. The programme will start in the upcoming academic year (2016-2017) and is explicitly devoted to the complex interplay between political and societal developments, drawing on insights from both political sociology and political science.
Combining both classic and contemporary theorizing with empirical research, we aim to provide students with understanding of key issues in contemporary politics. In the course The Social Bases of Politics, we address social differences in various value orientations, ideologies, and support for political parties, and social inequalities in political trust and political involvement, both in the formal political domain and in non-institutional politics. The course Political Attitudes and Behaviour in Context focuses on the various institutional and cultural conditions relevant for understanding why political attitudes and behaviours differ across and within countries and change over time. The third course, Citizens, Parties, and Governments in Global Times analyses how citizens react to globalisation processes, discusses new challenges that political parties face due to globalisation, and scrutinises how governments behave in a globalised context. Besides these core courses, students can enrol for relevant electives on topics in Urban Studies, Management & Organisation, and/or Public Administration. The program concludes with an extensive thesis, which has the format of a research paper.
We hope that the focus of the programme will be a useful addition to existing programmes that are more institutionally oriented or focus on political theory. In case you have students who might be interested in the programme, we would appreciate it if you could refer them to http://www.eur.nl/fsw/english/sociology/education/master/politics_society . In case they have specific questions about the contents of the programme, they can contact the head of the programme, Willlem de Koster, by email (dekoster@fsw.eur.nl).