Teaching

Studying Governance: Key Concepts and Leading Authors (BA)

KEYWORDS: GOVERNANCE, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, LAW, READING CLASSIC BOOKS, HISTORY

Classics can be very fascinating for understanding actual discussions in governance. Bureaucracy cannot be understood without Weber, Machiavelli is very present in political leadership and powerplay, and since Lindblom, Griffith and Kingdon we know that rationality is a too narrow concept for understanding policymaking and implementation. This course provides a historical overview of the study of public administration and policy in the context of societal developments. Students get acquainted with the main concepts and leading authors of politics and government; of public management and organisation; of policy law and regulating. In working groups we will read some of the old and modern classics and students will prepare presentations on them.

Policy Agenda Setting and Issue Framing (BA and MA)
KEYWORDS: AGENDA SETTING, FRAMING, POLICY, DATABASE CONSTRUCTION, PRACTICAL COURSE

During this course students learn how politicians prioritize certain policy issues and how policy issues get framed. We will discuss several issues, from animal welfare to climate change, and from safety policies to water management. The interaction between media and politicians plays an important role. We will be using existing databases about policy attention, such as parliamentary questions, newspaper articles, expert reports, and laws. But we will also learn how to do the actual coding for a database, and how to make an analysis about a specific moment of heightened political attention. Important here is the way problems are framed. Hence, we will be using framing analysis to understand how certain aspects of an issue get attention while others are downplayed - e.g. framing climate change as an urgent problem requiring immediate action versus framing climate change as too complex and uncertain to handle. Based on the datasets (which are partly developed during the course) students write a paper about a policy issue that was (or still is) on the political agenda. The course integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods

European Union Institutions and Policies (BA and MA)
KEYWORDS: EUROPEAN UNION, POLICY, DECISION MAKING, INSTITUTIONS

In this course we will explore the influence of the European Union on national policy-making and vice versa. The course provides an overview of the main institutions of the European Union, its legal structure and decision-making procedures. After this general introduction (and an excursion to Brussels), students will elaborate on a specific policy domain, such as, e.g., food safety, agriculture, marine policy, animal welfare or the environment. What is the future of farming in Europe? How does the Common Agricultural Policy work? How does the EU ensure food safety in the internal market? What are integrated EU marine policies? How have the EU Water or Habitat Directives been developed? These are examples of issues that will be studied.      

Governance, Trust and Policy Arrangements (BA and MA)
KEYWORDS: EUROPEAN UNION, TRUST, MARINE POLICY, TRUST, GROUP WORK

The purpose of this course is to learn how a complex EU policy program is being constructed and the implication of this program for trust-relations. Students will get acquainted with theories on trust, governance, and policy change. During the course students work on assignments in small groups and along the way they are writing an integrated EU policy program on the North Sea, a blue paper. They learn to negotiate with each other, to represent the interest of EU member states and sector perspectives, and to cope with insecurities, limited amount of information, and time.

Website to all courses of the Public Administration and Policy group click here

Core themes and the Ph.D. research experience (in NIG PhD programme)
KEY WORDS: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, POLITICAL SCIENCES, STATE OF HTE ART, DISCUSSING DISSERTATIONS, INTERACTIVE

This course has two objectives. First, it deals with several important themes of the study of public administration and political science. Second, it covers some of the typical practical experiences when doing a Ph.D. research project and writing a dissertation. Recent themes have included such topics as European decision-making, crisis management, infrastructure policy-making, regulatory agencies in the European Union, public management in the 21-century, comparative immigrant policy, the strategies of radical parties, and Constitutional thinking in the 21 century.The morning session is devoted to discussion of a specific theme that is based on ‘state of the art’ theoretical literature and parts of a selected dissertation. During the afternoons we invite young scholars who recently received their Ph.D. (or are close to receiving it) to discuss their dissertation, building on the literature discussed in the morning sessions. In these afternoon sessions we also talk about the practical difficulties of doing research and writing a dissertation, and exchange experiences on how the invited young scholars made choices that had an important effect on their research.