It's not very effective...

Political madness and miscellaneous

1 note

politicsbox asked: Oh, brilliant! I'm meant to be looking around universities for politics (depending on AS results, of course) soon, and Birmingham was suggested to me... What's the political science side of the course like? And I'm doing the broad subject of UK politics this year (although one side of the course is on Parliament, the Judiciary, the cabinet, etc, and the other side is on electoral systems and is a bit more ideologies-based) :)

Very broad - they give you a lot of choice if you do pure polsci rather than joint honours. A lot of political theory in first year to get the foundations in, but that’s the same at most Uni’s if you explicitly choose science over local government studies or similar. Expect a lot of Hobbes, JS Mill, yadda yadda - the usual suspects. There are some great modules for British Politics, up to date contemporary stuff and good political history. 

That’s cool - similar modules to me, I did parliament/judiciary/cabinet. Lots of time to rip in to Blair and his kitchen cabinet. That was always fun. My other side was US politics and POTUS elections. Which was good because it was the year Obama was elected. 

Obviously if you do amazingly well then look towards LSE or similar - but Birmingham has a cracking department (really well funded and populated by plenty of Marxist and Thatcherite lecturers a like - well not so many of the latter - but it’s a very political uni). In fact, Thatcherism was coined and defined here, I’m told. Great contribution to society…

But yeah - fire away if you wanna know anything else. I’m sure I get kudos for recommending a prospective student :)