Master of Public Policy

Professional Skills & Academic Methods

In these two modules, students train professional skills and the analytical tools needed to take policy decisions.

Professional Skills (1st and 2nd semesters)

In this module, students develop their own leadership capabilities and choose job skills trainings, ready for application at the workplace.

Leadership

Being able to analyse complex situations is an indispensable task for future leaders but one must also develop the personal skills to implemenet solutions. This module combines management and personal skills which are necessary for leadership functions in the public sector. It takes place in the second semester and consists of a lecture and a module examination.

The course delves into the theory and practice of public sector management, with a focus on strategic management. It introduces students to a variety of analytical techniques useful for policy implementation and managing organizational performance.

Strategic management in public administration involves defining public value, mobilizing legitimacy and support for that value, and developing and deploying the operational capacity to deliver it. By the end of the course, students are able to diagnose an organization’s strategic position and develop a plan for improving its performance; they should also be able to understand the organizational factors likely to affect a given policy’s implementation and to adjust policy design to produce a better outcome.

Related to that, leadership is the ability to influence a group of people towards a goal. Students will improve their leadership capacities through practice, reflection and feedback.

International Negotiations (elective)

International Negotiations

Strategic Foresight: Scenarios in Public Policy (elective)

Strategic Foresight: Szenarios in Public Policy

Academic Methods (2nd and 3rd semesters)

In this module, students acquaint themselves with basic statistics and choose further academic methods, suited to their research endeavors. Courses on qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods, as well as method experiments are offered.

Statistics for Public Policy

This module provides a comprehensive introduction into quantitative empirical approaches to policy analysis. The course shows how empirical research is carried out and how it can become the base of policy decisions and policy evaluation, and introduces the most widely used quantitative research methods and designs. It covers topics such as descriptive statistics, probabilities, inferential statistics, correlation and regression analysis.

Students become aware of the potentials and limitations of quantitative methods and can critically evaluate statistics and quantitative studies and their results. To that end, they will advance their methodological skills in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods, as well as research design.