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The seminar module offers a more extensive and more thorough analysis of a topic from within political science. To this end, the seminar module provides an overview and a critical discussion of the literature and the issues relevant for the topic of the seminar.
The objectives for this module are:
This course addresses three broad questions: How are interest groups organized? Why do they organize as they do? And does their organizational form shape their policy actions or capabilities?
Students of interest groups quite rightly want to know ‘how influential are interest groups?' and ‘what influence strategies groups choose, and why?'. These questions speak to important issues of group power. But, in all the focus on power and influence, it is sometimes easy to forget that in order to exercise any influence at all, groups need to first be formed and then to maintain themselves over time. Survival is precarious, and not all groups succeed in maintaining themselves. For those that do survive for any length of time, the precise ways in which they engage and participate in public policy - and the value they hold to policy makers - will be heavily shaped by the organizational form of the group. By organizational form, we refer to internal structure (decision making, democracy, and member participation), staffing, funding sources, and overall aims. The basic premise of this seminar is that in order to convincingly understand the multiple ways that interest groups engage in contemporary public policy - and the value groups are in policy terms - we need to understand how they operate and grow as organizations. Based on a review of interest group (and some organizational) theories, students will engage in their own empirical analysis of interest groups cases, either in Denmark or beyond.
Public Policy
Of the nine seminars the student has to pass as part of the MA degree, at least six seminar modules have to be in political science
Darren Halpin
The assessment method is oral exam on an essay .
External examiner/Graded marking.
The seminar module requires active participation of students. At the beginning of the seminar module the lecturer and the students agree on specific "activity requirements" that the students have to fulfill.
This seminar will consist of a mixture of formal lectures by staff and student-led discussions and presentations.
The module compendium consists of about 1,200 pages.
Details will be provided at the commencement of the class. But it will include the following:
Baumgartner, F.R. and Leech, B.L., (1998) Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Bell, S. 2007, ‘A Victim of its Own Success: Internationalisation, Neoliberalism and Organisational Involution at the Businesses Council of Australia' Politics and Society , 34; 543-70.
Bouwen, P. (2004) ‘Exchanging Access Goods for Access. A Comparative Study of Business Lobbying in the EU Institutions', European Journal of Political Research, 43 (3), 337-69.
Culpepper, P. (2003) Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe , Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Halpin, D., (2010) Groups, Democracy and Representation , Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Heaney, M.T. (2004) ‘Outside the Issue Niche: The Multidimensionality of Interest Group Identity', American Politics Research 32 (6), 611-651
Minkoff, D., Aisenbrey, S., and Agnone, J. (2008) ‘Organizational Diversity in the U.S. Advocacy Sector', Social Problems , 55 (4), 525-48.
Nownes, A.J. (2004), ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Formation: Mobilizing Gay and Lesbian Rights Interest Groups in the Unites States, 1950-98', British Journal of Political Science , 34, 49-67.
Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Salisbury, R.H. (1969) ‘An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups', Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13, pp. 1-32.
