POL10160 Foundations of Contemporary Politics

Academic Year 2020/2021

People mean many different things when they talk about ‘politics’.
Politics can be understood as the collective activity through which we organize the life we share in common, and work to give effect to the values we think are important such as freedom, justice, equality, peace, security.
Politics is also the term we use for the practices involved in organizing public life, regulating who gets involved in decision-making and on what terms, and shaping how much influence they get to have over those decisions, whether at local, national or transnational level.
And politics is often equated with the clash of preferences between people or groups, and the efforts people make to get their own way, sometimes by very low means indeed.
This module introduces a variety of ways of thinking about politics, the role of core political institutions such as parliaments and elections, and provides some of the key concepts and analytical frameworks and tools used in analysing politics.