Lectures are open for all, but students need to register in NettiOpsu. The seminar group has places for 12 students, preference is given to RES programme students. Those interested in joining the seminar (8h) are asked to discuss this with the Jean Monnet professor Hanna Ojanen during the course.

Credits: lectures + learning diary 3 ECTS; seminar 2 ECTS

Course programme

10.9. Introduction (Hanna Ojanen)

• Europe and wider Europe; borders of Europe; European integration as a definer of Europe

12.9. EU enlargement, history (Hanna Ojanen)

• theoretical approaches to and explanations of enlargement

17.9. Widening and deepening, or differentiation? (Hanna Ojanen)

• the functions of widening on basic treaties, institutions, policies

19.9. Economic integration in the West and in the East during the Cold War (Dr.Soc.Sc. Suvi  Kansikas, researcher, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki)

24.9. EU and its neighbourhood (Hanna Ojanen)

• ENP, EaP;  neighbourhood and security policy: ESS and beyond

26.9. The EU’s energy policy in the wider Europe and Turkey as a case study (Dicle Korkmaz) (including introduction to the seminar sessions)

1.10. EU-Turkey (Hanna Ojanen)

3.10. EU-Russia (Hiski Haukkala)

8.10. The shared neighbourhood of EU and Russia (Hiski Haukkala)

10.10. Russia’s integration into global economy (Anni Kangas)

This course is an introduction to the Finnish Political System and Finnish Political History. The main focus of the course is on the development of the Finnish Political System from 1809 until the 21st century. This course provides an overview of the Constitution, political decision making, political participation and tripartite agreements. After the course, students are expected to understand the key features of Finnish political history, the political system and society, as well as able to perceive the political position and national identity of Finland in a wider context: Scandinavia, Russia and the EU.

The course discusses India's position and foreign and security policy in the changing international order from India's independence to the present. The focus in the course is in India's rise into one of the actors which will shape the future international order and the challenges the rise of India will present for the international community.

Recent evidence points in the direction of EU becoming increasingly politicized and salient in domestic politics, with Europe as an issue also affecting the performance of parties in national and European parliamentary elections. Europe may thus not be in the minds of the citizens most of the time, but public opinion constrains elites and parties more than before. The objective of the course is to analyse why and how citizens and political parties oppose European integration. The course consists of lectures, seminars and an essay. In the seminars the students are expected to produce an essay and an oral presentation on a topic related to Euroscepticism.

http://www.uta.fi/jkk/pol/index/The Politics of Euroscepticism.pdf

Email registration to tapio.raunio@uta.fi by October 15 essential

Course overview: This course is an introduction to the structure and functioning of American political institutions, with special emphasis on the theory and practice of American democracy, the political meanings of the U. S. Constitution, the structure and organization of Congress, the executive and judicial branches, the evolution of civil rights policy, campaigns and elections, and the political influence of interest groups. Over the past two centuries, the government of the United States has grown enormously in size, scope and power. Nevertheless, many features of the modern American regime would still be recognizable to its founders. The most important of these are federalism and civil liberties. However, the principle of majority rule through elections has remained an essential anchor of American democracy. When the people vote, they are participating in the determination of who rules, but they are also giving their consent to be governed. Elections are as important today as ever, but are they important for the same reasons? Elections are important, but to whom, and for what? These are some of the salient issues we would be addressing in this course. Students are also acquainted with the substantive areas of economic, social, foreign, and defense policies.

Instructional outcomes/learning objectives: A student who successfully completes this class, should be able to: acquire an integrated understanding of the nature and responsibilities of the American government as an institution; understand the role of congress and bureaucrats as lawmakers and administrators, respectively; understand the role of the Supreme Court in adjudicating and reinforcing the fundamental rights and liberties as granted in the constitution; understand the role of individuals, interest groups, and other publics as participants in the democratic process; develop an analytical frame of mind and a critical assessment of current/contemporary political issues; and acquire adequate foundation to take other higher-level courses in American government and politics.

Basic course outline:

Evaluating governments:

(1) Introduction – the People, Community, and the concept of the State; political socialization and political culture; the Frameworks of Government

(2) The U. S Constitution

(3) Federalism, Powers, and State Sovereignty

(4) The Courts I: Civil Liberties

(5) The Courts II: Civil and Political Rights

The Institutions of Government:

(6) The U. S. Congress

(7) The Presidency                                                                  

(8) The Judiciary

(9) The Bureaucracy

Political Actors and Pressure Groups:

(10) The News Media

(11) Public Opinion

(12) Political Parties

(13) Interest Groups

(14) The Campaign Process, Voting Behavior and Elections

Approaches to policy making:

(15) Stages of the Policy Making Process I / Social Welfare Policy II                                                   

(16) U. S. Economic Policy I: Theories and Models

Classical, Supply-side, Keynesian, and monetarist models. Theoretical models.

(17) U. S. Economic Policy II: Micro and Macro Applications

Micro and macro approaches; market regulation, fiscal and monetary policies, national budgetary issues.

(18).Foreign and Defense Policy:

From Cold war to Détente, bipolarity to multilateralism, national security, asymmetrical warfare (terrorism), and nuclear proliferation.

Aims: 1) To describe, analyse, compare and contrast the nature of politics and policy-making in the five Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden 2) To adopt a thematic approach to understanding politics in the region Objectives/outcomes: 1) At the end of the course students should be able critically to review the main features of the political systems of the Nordic countries and to place Finnish practice in a wider comparative perspective. The course will start with an introduction to contemporary Scandinavian politics. It will proceed from the 'gold standard' of a set of strong, consensus-based democracies with comprehensive welfare systems. 'Paradise', so to speak, involved dominant social democrat-driven states, providing 'womb-to-tomb' protection underpinned by organised political societies displaying high levels of associationalism (social capital). Following the 'set-up' the question of 'paradise lost' will be considered by reference three macro-change processes and their ramifications. 1) Social structural change and changing patterns of political participation: from class-based to issue-based mobilisation; issue-based voting and inter-party competition; distinguishing interest in, and involvement in politics. 'Spectator Democracy' (Goul Andersen). 2) Party system change: from social democracy to 'disintegrating democracy' in Norway (Østerud), 'party-based democracy on trial' in Finland (Karvonen and Paloheimo). 3) Macro-economic change: the impact of globalisation and Europeanisation; the crisis in the euro-zone (albeit Finland is the only member); the rise of nationalist/chauvinist sentiment, reflected and reinforced in extreme/populist radical right parties, inter alia, the parliamentary breakthrough in 2010 of the [formerly neo-Nazi] Sweden Democrats. Evidence of anti-immigrant, anti-Islam sentiment. Anders Breivik; the Nokia 'bubble' bursts. Are the Nordic states making international news for all the wrong reasons? Following a critical examination of Scandinavian politics today, the course will revert in time to the completion of mass democracy and the introduction of proportional electoral systems. It will essay a longitudinal, socio-historical perspective with the focus on party-building and parties as a link between state and society. Lipset and Rokkans's four formative revolutions and an application of the Lipset and Rokkan model to the Nordic context. Sweden as the prototype of the five-party 'Scandinavian party system model' (Berglund and Lindström) and deviations from the Swedish protype. What about the parenthetical 's'? The first part of the course will conclude by examining the relative strengths of the historic party types. It will describe and analyse the electoral supremacy of social democracy in Denmark, Norway and most notably Sweden; the strength and resilience of agrarianism in Finland; the strength of the radical left in Norden; the merger of liberalism and conservatism in Iceland; the historic party system(s) from a voter perspective.

Course Schedule

October 22 Introduction. Seeing yourself as others see you

October 24 Sartori: “It is impossible to compare stones and rabbits” [How] can we compare the Nordic states?

October 29 What are the main features of the Nordic model? The ‘Admiration Society’ perspective

October 31 ‘Trouble in Paradise: On the hijab and Danish meatballs

November 5 Is the Nordic model too old for the catwalk?

November 7 The ‘Hell on Earth’ Scenario: American, British and Swedish ‘Hawks’

November 12 ‘Is there anything distinctive about Scandinavian Politics Today? [seminar]

November 14 Less, less, less and less: Whatever happened to the Nordic model?

November 19 Gender equality and the representation of minorities in Scandinavia

November 21 The advent of mass democracy and female tram drivers

November 26 The making of the Scandinavian party system model: Testing your ‘mental arithmetic’

November 28 How far was class the basis of Nordic party politics until the late 1960s?

December 3  New parties break the mould: The Earthquake elections of 1970-73

December 5 That ‘Thin Red Line’: Explaining the Strength of Scandinavian Social Democracy

December 10 From Class to Catchall Parties?: the Agrarian-Centre Parties

December 12 Conclusions  

Email registration to david.arter@uta.fi by October 8 essential

A web-based course

Registration in January 2014 in the following address:

Week 1  (30 Jan) COURSE INTRODUCTION

 INTRODUCTION TO SECURITY STUDIES

Week 2 (13 Feb) SECURITIZATION THEORY 101

Read: Wæver, Ole. (1995): Securitization and Desecuritization. In Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security. New York: Columbia University Press.

Paper question: What does securitization theory do as a theory?

 INITIAL CRITICISMS

Read: Eriksson, Johan (1999): Observers or advocates? On the Political Role of Security Analysts. Cooperation and Conflict 34(3): 311-30.

Paper question: What kind of research is the theory of securitization intended for?

Week 3 (27 Feb) SECURITIZATION THEORY AND THE POLITICAL

Read: Gad, Ulrik Pram and Petersen, Karen Lund (2011) Concepts of Politics in Securitization Studies. Security Dialogue 42(4-5): 315-328.

Paper question: What kind of an understanding of the political and of politics does the theory of securitization entail?

 WORDS, IMAGES, AND BODIES: SECURITIZATION BEYOND WORDS

Read: Vuori, Juha A. (2010) A Timely Prophet? The Doomsday Clock as a Visualization of Securitization Moves with a Global Referent Object. Security Dialogue 41(3): 255-277.

N.B. The Wilkinson chapter in the course book is also relevant here.

Paper question: Is the theory of securitization limited to the study of speech because it is based on speech act theory?

Week 4 (20 Mar) SECURITY, EVENT, CONTEXT: WHAT KIND OF A THEORY IS SECURITIZATION THEORY

Read: Vuori, Juha A. (2008): Illocutionary Logic and Strands of Securitisation – Applying the Theory of Securitisation to the Study of Non-Democratic Political Orders. European Journal of International Relations 14(1): 65-99.

N.B.: Balzacq, Thierry (2011): A theory of securitization: origins, core assumptions, and variants. In Thierry Balzacq (ed.) Securitization theory: How security problems emerge and dissolve. London: Routledge. should also be read by this point.

Paper question: What is the relation of the theory of securitization to the (assumed) phenomenon of securitization? What does this entail for the study of securitization?

 ISSUES OF METHOD

Read: Balzacq, Thierry (2011): Enquiries into methods: a new framework for securitization analysis. In Thierry Balzacq (ed.) Securitization theory: How security problems emerge and dissolve. London: Routledge. AND Salter, Mark (2013): Research Design. In Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu (eds.) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies, an Introduction. London: Routledge. AND an article or book chapter that applies the method you have selected.

Paper question: What method are you going to use in your essay? What kinds of opportunities and limits does this method set for studying securitization?

Week 5 (3 Apr) SEMINAR DAY WITH ESSAY PRESENTATIONS

Read: ESSAYS

Week 6 (10 Apr) EXAM

The course is in English (a web-based course).

Registration in December 2013, starting 1st of December. See

Aims: 1) To describe, analyse, compare and contrast the nature of politics and policy-making in the five Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden 2) To adopt a thematic approach to understanding politics in the region

Objectives/outcomes: 1) At the end of the course students should be able critically to review the main features of the political systems of the Nordic countries and to place Finnish practice in a wider comparative perspective. This teaching period the focus will be on the incidence of high-volatility elections since 1970; the advent and significance of new parliamentary parties (many short-lived); types of new parties on the basis of the process of their origination (Arter 2012); entrepreneurial parties; 'rooted new parties' backed by a 'promoter organisation' (Bolleyer and Bytzek 2013); 'persistent new parties'. The travails of the 'old' 'pole parties' (Rokkan/Sundberg): for example, the Swedish Centre (formerly Agrarian Party) is in danger of not making the 4 per cent national qualifying threshold in 2014 whilst three years earlier its Finnish counterpart plummeted to an historic nadir. In similar fashion, the Social Democrats reached new depths in Sweden (2010) and Finland (2011) and the Danish party has not been the largest party since the turn of the new millennium. The rise of protest parties on the radical right. Turning from parties to the electoral rules and the procedures, the lectures will cover candidate selection (recruitment) procedures (centralised/decentralised); preferential voting systems (Finland, Sweden, Denmark); closed-list PR (Norway); electoral systems as incentive structures; intra-party candidate competition and personal-vote-seeking; candidate types; parties' electoral strategies (pre-electoral alliances, joint lists etc); election campaigns, the main issues; changing campaign styles (canvassing etc); the digitalisation of election campaigns; voters and the Internet (Karlsen 2010); voting machines (Finland); candidate use of websites, blogs, Facebook etc. The 'electoral connection': who do MPS represent, how do they represent them and what do voters expect their representatives to do?

Course Schedule

January 14 Introduction: Why hold elections?

January 16 The Scandinavian electoral systems

January 21 Proto-parties and the Road to Mass Democracy

January 23 PR, Red/Green Parties and the Completion of the Scandinavian Party System Model

January 28 Berglund and Lindström’s ‘Parenthetical ‘S’ question

January 30 The Thaw, the Earthquake and the Rise of Populist Protest

February 4 New ‘Party Families’ – Greens, Christian Democrats and Eco-Socialists

February 6 Individualised Voting and Individualised Campaigning

February 11 Is Party-Based Democracy in Scandinavia in Trouble?

February 13 SEMINAR: “What are the principal determinants of voting behaviour in Scandinavia today?”

February 18 SEMINAR: “How far would you agree that preferential voting systems are more democratic?”

February 20 Conclusions

Email registration to david.arter@uta.fi by December 13 essential

Introduction to theoretical thinking and EU external relations (common foreign, security and defence policy of the EU: chronology and landscape, cases); federalism now and then; functionalism and neofunctionalism; realism and intergovernmentalism; theorising the theories: the impact of scientific disciplines and values on theories; institutionalism and supranationalism; enlargement and Europeanisation; normative power and international relations; inter-organisational relations.

Keywords

Theories of European integration, EU external relations, foreign, security and defence policy of the EU, EU enlargement, the EU’s relations with international organisations

Aims: 1) To describe, analyse, compare and contrast the nature of politics and policy-making in the five Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden 2) To adopt a thematic approach to understanding politics in the region

Objectives/outcomes: 1) At the end of the course students should be able critically to review the main features of the political systems of the Nordic countries and to place Finnish practice in a wider comparative perspective. The broad focus in this final teaching period will be on legislative-executive relations and i) whether there is a distinctive Nordic parliamentarism, and ii) whether there is a Nordic model of government and iii) whether there has been a 'presidentialisation' of the executive. Topics covered will include 'How democratic are the Nordic parliaments?' The corollary of this question will be determining the evaluative criteria and reflecting on the influence of the premises of participatory democracy and deliberative democracy in the region. Referenda and citizens' initiatives. A discussion of semi-presidential government will take due note of the new constitution in Iceland and changes to the presidential office in Finland.  the size, structure and partisan composition of governments; the frequency of minority governments (Denmark, Sweden and earlier Norway); 'surplus majority' governments (Finland); the shift towards 'bloc coalitions and potential alternation in government (Norway and Sweden); the persistence of across-the-blocs, 'anything goes' governments in Finland; The government at work (including informal sessions); the demise of semi-president government in Finland; what sort of president do Finns want? Towards a 'presidential' prime minister in the Scandinavian countries?

COURSE PROGRAMME

The course will be structured around four overarching themes:

1. Rules, behaviour and Nordic democracy in comparative perspective: Did Lijphart get it right?
2. The Scandinavian model of government: Is it just a distant memory?
3. Is there a distinctive Nordic model of parliamentarism?
4. Is there a ‘crisis of democracy’ in the Nordic states?

Seminar questions will include:

a)     What do Nordic MPs do?

b)    Can we speak of prime ministerial government in Scandinavia?

c)     ‘Minority governments work best where they are most common’ How far is this true in Scandinavia?

d)    ‘The institution of the presidency is simply outdated’

e)    How useful is the notion of ‘policy style’?

f)      Does Scandinavian government deserve its reputation for transparency?

Email registration to david.arter@uta.fi by March 1 essential

• Tuesday 11 March 2014, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  
  An introduction. Political leadership  what it is, what does it do and what do we need it for?
  
  
• Wednesday 12 March, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  
  Elected and ejected  How is political power achieved, obtained and lost? A comparison of party leader selection and ejection in Finland and Britain from the 1960s until the present.
  
  
• Tuesday 18 March, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  
  Pathways to power: Female politicians  breaking the glass ceiling. What were the societal discussions and historical processes that preceded womens breakthrough to presidency and party leadership in Finland and other Nordic countries?
  
  
• Wednesday 19 March, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  
  Personalisation of political power  Political leadership in the media democracies. Success stories and failures in political campaigning and media strategies from the late 1950s until the present in the U.S. and Finland.
  
  
• Wednesday 26 March, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  
  Students present an abstract and the first notions for their essays and get advice and constructive comments from the lecturer and fellow students to improve their ideas and complete their work. A closing discussion and feedback on the course will be given. 

The course introduces students to the phenomenon of political leadership from a variety of perspectives. Students are encouraged to analyse political leadership as a process taking place in a particular historical and societal context and being always defined by the political system in which it appears. After completing the course, students will have tools to both understand and scrutinise the process phases including pursuing, achieving, using and losing political power.   In addition to lectures, students share their ideas and experiences with their fellow students in workshops. To provide a wide scale of examples and viewpoints for the discussions, the course warmly welcomes students from different cultural and academic backgrounds including (but not limited to) political science, history, gender studies, journalism and media studies.  

Email registration to mari.k.niemi@uta.fi by March 3 essential