Admission requirements
Bachelor Public Administration students (BBO + EBM), Erasmus Exchange Students (Public Administration) and participants in the Minor 'Public Administration - Multi-level Governance' and 'Bestuurskunde: Openbaar Bestuur, Beleid en Management'.
Description
Digital technology is vital for government today as all important tasks and decisions depend on it. If technology doesn’t work well then government doesn’t function. In the course Governance and Digitalisation, we address what citizens and public employees need to be aware of when everything the government does depends on digital technology. The course gives students the tools to navigate and make sense of the key topics and challenges of digital technology.
The course is built around the study of seven core government technology domains (governance of artificial intelligence, social media, machine learning, data science, e-governance and autonomous weapons). By matching these domains with case studies, knowledge videos and scientific articles and chapters, the course introduces students to the major discussion points, including whether bad technology performance contributes to public dissatisfaction and distrust, how artificial intelligence can make public services better, and whether governments need to become more or less transparent.
The course is lecture based in structure with some group work built into the lectures. Lectures will also be interactional to the extent possible with opportunities for discussion. The lectures are designed to open the floor to students to present and discuss their take on the material.
Course objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Explain what the key public sector digital technologies are, how they work and why their impacts are so critical.
2. Use insights from a selection of academic literature to describe the main questions and points of debate in empirical research.
3. Use analytical skills to connect academic debates to real world policy contexts such as parliamentary reports on technologies, criminal cases or diplomatic incidents involving technology.
Timetable
On the right side of the programme front page of the Prospectus you will find links to the website and timetables, uSis and Brightspace.
Mode of Instruction
TBA
Course load
Lectures = 7x2=14 hours
Assessment (final exam and viewing) = 5 hours
Self-study = 121 hours
Assessment method
TBA
Reading list
Learning materials will be made available in the course syllabus on Brightspace.
Registration
Registration via MyStudymap is possible from Tuesday 14 July 2026 13:00h after registration for the entire minor. Register for every course via MyStudymap. Some courses of the minor have a limited number of participants, so register on time. Registration for the exam is mandatory.
Please note 1: Registration for the resit of an exam is mandatory, this has to be done by the student and can be done from TBA until 10 days before the exam. Until 5 days before the exam you can email OSC and fill in a form.
Please note 2: guest-/contract-/exchange students do not register via MyStudymap but via uSis. Registration via uSis is possible from Thursday 16 July 2026 after registration for the entire minor.
More information on registration via MyStudymap can be found on this page.
Leiden University uses Brightspace as its online learning management system. After enrolment for the course in MyStudymap you will be automatically enrolled in the Brightspace environment of this course.
Contact
Alex Ingrams: a.r.ingrams@fgga.leidenuniv.nl