Political Communication: Opinion Processes and Influence

Candidates who have completed the Political communication: opinion processes and influence, will have acquired the following knowledge, skills and general competences:

Knowledge

After completion of the course, the candidate:

• has advanced knowledge about essential theories and concepts in political communication, like opinion formation, misinformation, agenda-setting, framing, echo chambers, motivated reasoning, and populism
• has advanced knowledge about essential developments in political communication in established democracies
• has advanced knowledge about how a changing media system challenges established knowledge in the political communication field and changes the conditions for actors who wants to influence political processes

Skills

After completion of the course, the candidate:

• can critically analyze how political communication systems inform and influence citizens
• can critically analyze the influence of social media in today’s political communication environment
• can critically analyze the communicative power relations between political actors
• can critically discuss and disentangle scientific articles

General competence

After completion of the course, the candidate:

• has a general understanding of how political communication influence power relations in society
• is able to identify and analyze issues of social and scientific relevance from a political communication perspective

Students enrolled in the master`s program HFM2-POLK and SVM2-OLA will have priority for this course.

Students enrolled in other Master's Degree Programmes can, on application, be admitted to the course if this is cleared by their own study programme.

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Teaching in the course is organised as lectures and seminars.

Compulsory activity:

The students must have the following two obligatory activities approved in order to qualify for the exam:

• Participation in the submission of at least 4 out of 5 seminar hand-ins.

If you get ill or have other valid reasons for not being able to attend, you must apply for valid absence. The course teacher can assign a different task to compensate for missed attendance.

Read more about compulsory activities at the Faculty of Humanities and find link to the application form.

4 hours take-home exam.

The compulsory activities must be approved before the exam.

• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Withdrawal during an examination / Resitting an examination