Politics and Data Analytics

You will learn theories about politics and international relations, and learn how to translate these theories into empirical questions that can be studied using real life data.

Specifically, you learn data analytic and data science techniques to evaluate the effectiveness of policies, understand political behaviour, predict and classify political phenomena and describe and analyse networks of relationships between individuals, political agents or organisations.

By completing the core and optional units, you can gain sought-after skills, including:

• how to collect, describe and visualise data;

• how to build quantitative models to explain phenomena;

• how to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of policies;

• how to map and analyse complex social networks;

• how to implement key machine learning algorithms;

• how to implement data analytic techniques and data science algorithms using statistical software including R, as well as proprietary packages such as SPSS.

The pathway emphasises the application of modern data analytic methods to real life problems while also teaching some of the underlying theory. This will support career progression to more advanced postgraduate courses and to more challenging scenarios in policy and industry.