Content Official Master's Degree in Advanced Research in Political Science

Ideal student profile

Ideal applicants should have the following characteristics:

a) Bachelor’s degree in a social science subject with an excellent overall grade;
b) high motivation to complete higher education studies with the aim of engaging in a research career in the area of political science;
c) competence in written and spoken English.

Complementary to these characteristics value will be placed on applications from students with previous studies in a different field as long as they show a high level of interest in rigorous study of political phenomena.

Basic skills

• Use acquired knowledge as a basis for originality in the application of ideas, often in a research context.
• Solve problems in new or little-known situations within broader (or multidisciplinary) contexts related to the field of study.
• Integrate knowledge and use it to make judgements in complex situations, with incomplete information, while keeping in mind social and ethical responsibilities.
• Communicate and justify conclusions clearly and unambiguously to both specialist and non-specialist audiences.
• Continue the learning process, to a large extent autonomously.

Specific skills

• Recognise the complexity of political situations, diversity and the tensions to which they are subjected, with special emphasis on the Spanish and European contexts.
• Analyse the main economic, social and political challenges in contemporary democracies.
• Examine public policies in different sector areas.
• Analyse the behaviour and political attitudes of citizens and the political communication processes in which they are immersed.
• Analyse the design, functioning and consequences of political institutions and their relations with processes of governance.
• Apply knowledge and techniques to analyse political situations to be able to generate proposals and points of view which are useful for decision-making.
• Identify the main methodological problems arising from political analysis and be able to address them using existing tools.
• Generate and manage sets of data and sources specific to political sciences as statistics, surveys and other documents.
• Apply advanced qualitative and quantitative techniques for the systematic and rigorous analysis of specific aspects of political situations.
• Use advanced techniques for collecting primary data using surveys and experiments and the automatic internet data extraction.
• Use advanced regression techniques for analysing limited dependent variables and longitudinal and multilevel data.
• Use advanced methods for the generation and analysis of data adequate for making causal inferences through experimental and quasi-experimental designs.
• Design and carry out a research project which satisfies the criteria for academic rigour and excellence.

Cross-curricular skills

General competences are acquired through all the modules, although only those which appear in the summary table area assessed. For Master’s degrees the UAB considers general and transferable competences as equivalent.

• Demonstrate leadership ability.
• Generate innovative research ideas and proposals.
• Work in international and interdisciplinary teams.
• Use adequate criteria to autonomously evaluate reports, documents and research carried out by others.
• Carry out and write up projects and technical reports autonomously using the appropriate terminology, argumentation and analytical tools for each case.
• Understand and write specialised advanced research texts in political science.
• Apply a gender perspective in research into political phenomena.