Admission requirements
Entry requirements for Exchange students: basic familiarity with social science research methods.
Prerequisites for participation in the Bachelor Seminars are the successful completion of the propaedeutic phase of the programme (first year). There are no other courses or background requirements.
Description
Voters play a crucial role in choosing their representatives. In this capacity, citizens can stimulate, tolerate, or prevent democratic backsliding. At a time when citizens are exposed to constant flows of political information through traditional and digital media, understanding how citizens form political opinions and make electoral choices has become essential to understanding democratic resilience and decline.
This course examines how media shape political attitudes and electoral behavior in democracies. Drawing on theories such as agenda-setting, priming, framing, and motivated reasoning, students analyze how different media environments influence the way people think about politics and make political decisions.
The course addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing democracies today, including misinformation, disinformation, informational warfare, polarization, and declining trust in institutions. In class, examples are drawn from different political contexts, including but not limited to Bulgaria, Estonia, and Georgia.
Combining academic literature with real-world cases, the course encourages students to critically engage with contemporary media and political developments and to apply course concepts to additional country cases of their own interest.
Course objectives
After completing this course, students:
are familiar with and have a clear understanding of key concepts, theories, and debates related to media, and its influence on political behavior in a democratic context.
gained experience in discussing and critically assessing academic literature on topics related to media and political behavior in a democratic context.
can design and conduct a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method research project on topics related to media and political behavior in a democratic context.
Teaching method
Seminars take place twice a week. Seminars consist of discussions and group presentations. Reading before class and in-class participation are expected.
Assessment method
Participation: 10%
Student-led session: 20%
Group presentation (with Q&A component): 20%
Group research project (with individual oral defense): 50%
Resit, review & feedback
A retake for the group research project will be offered if the grade is lower than 5.5.
No retakes are available for the other grade components.
Reading list
Readings will be a mixture of book chapters and journal articles. A syllabus with the reading list will be made available through Brightspace in time.
Registration
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
Contact
Feel free to contact the lecturer if you have any substantive questions about this course:
a.l.van.vliet@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc., contact the Student Services Centre: ssc@leiden.edu