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University College Dublin MSc Politics & Data Science
University College Dublin

MSc Politics & Data Science

Dublin, Ireland

1 Years

English

Full time

Request application deadline

Sep 2025

EUR 22,600 / per year *

On-Campus

* full time non-EU fee per year - € 22600; EU fee per year - € 10350 | part time non-EU fee per year - € 11300; EU fee per year - € 6580

Introduction

The explosion of online and social media, the proliferation of digitized information, and improved electronic access to political decision-making processes provide new opportunities to study existing and emerging political processes in various democratic and non-democratic political regimes. The simultaneous development of cutting-edge data science methods to study digital text, audio, and video provide the tools we need to take advantage of these opportunities. The MSc Politics and Data Science is designed to equip students with the theoretical knowledge and methodological skills necessary to examine and understand politics in the digital age.

The MSc Politics and Data Science programme is organised around two streams of study. The first stream grounds students with backgrounds in political science and related social sciences in data science methods. The second stream is geared towards students with computer science or related technical backgrounds, teaching them about research design and theories in political science.

Apart from the three core modules in the Social Science Background stream, students can select three modules that best fit their interests. Apart from the core module and the optional core module in the Technical Background stream, students select four modules that best fit their interests. These modules can either revolve around methods needed to study digital and digitised politics, such as programming and machine learning, quantitative text analysis, statistics, and experimental methods. Or they can be modules relating to comparative politics, international relations, political violence, political economy, and related fields that the School of Politics and International Relations has strengths in.

The programme thus provides a thorough grounding in political science and its sub-disciplines and in-depth training in the empirical methods necessary to study important questions emerging in these areas of study.

Vision and Values Statement

The programme shall equip students with both the theoretical overview and the empirical tools necessary to understand and engage with the brave new world of digitised politics, and the expansion in scale, types, and complexity of data available to study political phenomena. The MSc in Politics and Data Science provides students with in-depth knowledge of political science theories and approaches and methodological training to apply these tools in a theoretically-informed manner. It offers advanced training in statistical and computational methods, including tools to extract and prepare unstructured data (data wrangling), detect patterns and predict behaviour based on statistical data, evaluate the veracity of theoretical models on large-scale datasets, analyse highly interconnected data from networks and spatial data sets, and to develop simulations to evaluate the inherent consistency and implications of theoretical arguments.

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