This module is offered to second year undergraduate students which combines classic approaches to and recent developments on the study of the relationship between public opinion and public policy in advanced democracies with research design aspects. This is a
research-connected teaching module for motivated students who are interested in understanding the role of public opinion in policy and how research is conducted. Students will be constantly exposed to high-quality research based on sophisticated theories and empirical analyses on the opinion-policy nexus.
The module will scrutinise questions like:
Do parties respond to voters?
Are political elites’ views congruent with those of voters?
Do policymakers stick to their election mandate or represent changes in public opinion’s preferences and priorities?
Under what circumstances do policymakers change their policy?
To what public opinion signals do they respond?
Do governments respond to protest?
Does public opinion respond to policy?
Are policy views of some groups represented differently?
Do politicians listen and explain their decisions?
Scholars have provided answers to such questions with different methodologies and research designs (e.g., large-N designs, comparative designs and experimental designs). Throughout the module, we will vivisect excellent research by discussing how scholars have designed their research on opinion-policy:
What are their hypotheses?
How do they conceptualise terms like responsiveness and congruence?
How do they measure and operationalise their concepts?
What data do they collect to answer their research questions and test their hypotheses?
What are the advantages and limitations of their research?
At the end of the module, students will become familiar with opinion-policy research and its findings. Their coursework submission will be a research design based on a topic from the module. This module will push students beyond their comfort zone but will also give them the preconditions for undertaking a successful dissertation in their final year.