Undergraduate Course: Social capital and political participation in the 21st century (Summer School) (SCPL10033)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | This is a summer school course.
This course examines the great variety and complexity of forms of political participation in contemporary societies. It engages with inequalities in political participation by introducing and applying social capital concepts to investigate the societal structures through with people engage with political decision making. |
| Course description |
This course will engage students with the changes that forms of political participation have undergone in recent decades. After introductions to different participation types, including traditional forms of representation (through parties and voting), the course will engage with elite-challenging forms of participation, approaches to direct democracy and organised interest representation. It will discuss the role of new communication forms and how they may affect the political engagement of people with each other as well as political decision makers. A major focus of the course will be on inequalities in access and uptake of political participation by different societal groups and how we may explain this using social capital approaches students will be familiarised with. The course will be taught in a highly interactive fashion and will allow students to engage with relevant literature as well as expert practitioners who are going to contribute to the course through a variety of workshops.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Learning the differences between existing forms of political participation
- Learning different formulations of the concept of social capital and the key debates on the approaches to the concept
- Understanding key inequalities in engagement with forms of political participation by different groups of people
- Understanding how different forms of structural position (as expressed through social capital concepts) affect people¿s propensity to engage with different forms of political participation
- Being able to apply concepts developed in the course to real-life examples
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
University of Edinburgh students will not receive credit for this course. |
| Keywords | Political participation, Social capital, social inequality, democracy |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Jan Eichhorn
Tel: (0131 6)51 2921
Email: |
Course secretary | |
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