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Understanding Populism, Authoritarianism and Post-Truth (973M9)

15 credits, Level 7 (Masters)

Spring teaching

On this module, you’ll tackle the three major challenges to contemporary democratic politics: populism, authoritarianism and post-truth.

You’ll cover:

• the challenge to democratic politics by populist actors
• critiques of liberal democracy
• the challenge of authoritarianism as represented by emergence of hybrid regimes of democracy
• competitive authoritarianism and the process of democratic backsliding that leads to it.

The challenge of post-truth is represented by the challenge to knowledge, authority, science and politics itself by denialism. You’ll address the way in which each of these ideas have been conceptualised, defined and applied to politics.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 22 hours of contact time and about 128 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2026/27. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.