Knowledge and understanding
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Define basic concepts of political science as a part of basic approaches and theories. The student should be able to define concepts such as power, interest, legitimacy, freedom, equality, justice, political process, political institution, political ideology, political culture, political actors. They should recognise how these concepts occur in everyday political speech and scientific texts, and recognise the difference between political speech and scientific politological analysis.
Explain how political institutions function, how they maintain stability and change, what is the difference between authoritarian and democratic government, which are the conditions for maintenance of democracy, and how the same ideologies appear in different forms in different countries and periods.
Application
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Group and describe basic approaches in the analysis of political phenomena and describe their difference on various examples.
Understand political structures, processes and mechanisms that produce phenomena such as state crisis, institutional change, political corruption and others.
Apply acquired knowledge on explaining political phenomena that surround the student from electoral processes, ideological fights, media presentation of political events.
Illustrate basic contours of politological explanation of political phenomena.
Analysis
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Demonstrate the causes and connections of political phenomena such as transformation of political systems, political culture and civil society.
Categorise types of political phenomena which are important for further analysis of the relations between social structure and political phenomena, such as types of electoral systems, types of political parties or systems.
Compare different theoretical to political phenomena.
Synthesis
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Construct elementary explanations of political phenomena by the application and comparison of different theooretical approaches.
Propose the best manners for researching some phenomena.
Evaluation
After successfully completing the course, students will be able to:
Examine how to place what daily happens in political life into a politological framework of explanation.
Compare applicability of individual approaches for the analysis of different types of political phenomena.
Compare theoretical frameworks of explanation (behaviourism, rational choice approach, pluralism, institutional analysis) in the explanatioin of individual political phenomena.
Evaluate advantages and disadvantages of individual approaches for researching individual phenomena.
Assess to which extent certain approaches can provide answers to formulated questions, i.e. the applicability of a theoretical approach for understanding the researched phenomenon.
Knowledge is assessed in seminars, mid-term examinations, written and oral exams. Mid-term exam is a written form of assessing knowledge in which the student must demonstrate that s/he is able to define politologicall concepts, reproduce explanation of some basic politial processes, group phenomena, for example, to recognize the phenomena of political subculture in a variety of contexts, to compare terms and their meanings and explanatory achievements, such as legitimacy and power, and to sketch how some problem could be investigated or explained by various theoretical frameworks. Written exam consists of reproductions of some elementary explanations of the phenomenon, comparing some elementary concepts and explanations from different theoretical perspectives, concepts and application of theory to some simple explanation of the phenomenon.
Oral examination consists of testing understanding of basic concepts and theories, comparison of these theories and concepts from political life, evaluation of applicability of these concepts and theories in the sense of their explanatory power for individual phenomena.