The European Union: Institutions and Politics

Course Code: PUBLG079

Course Tutor: Dr Christine Reh (Department of Political Science)

Assessment: One 3000 word essay and one 2 hour unseen written examination

Credit Value: 30

About this course

This course is designed to equip students with the empirical knowledge, theoretical understanding and transferable skills necessary to analyse and evaluate the European Union’s institutions, decision-making and political processes.

The course starts with the theoretical debate about the nature of the European Union; introduces the EU's institutions and decision-making; discusses executive, legislative and judicial politics; analyses key issues of European governance such as compliance with European law, lobbying, public opinion and democratic representation; and assesses the impact of enlargement on the EU as a political system.

By the end of the course, students will have

• acquired an in-depth knowledge of the EU's institutions;
• gained a systematic understanding of input and output politics in the EU;
• engaged with the conceptual and normative debate about supranational governance;
• interpreted their knowledge through the main theories in political science;
• learned to critically assess empirical evidence and present theoretical arguments;
• trained transferable skills for the analytical study of politics and policy-making.

This is a core module for students registered on the MSc European Public Policy programme and is not available as an optional module.