The Master’s Program in Political Science
Important notice
From winter semester 2024/25, a new curriculum (version 2024) will apply to the Master’s program in Political Science, which will be binding for all newly enrolled students. Students who have applied for the program after 14 March 2025, i. e., who start studying in winter semester 2025/26 or later, must also go through a new application procedure, which was introduced by an amendment to the curriculum (version 2025). Students who have completed the BA Political Science or the BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Salzburg are exempt from this – students of these two programs can be admitted directly to the MA Political Science without further requirements and without having to go through the application procedure. With the exception of this application procedure, the two curricula are identical. Further details on the application procedure can be found here.
Students who started their studies according to the 2016 curriculum (i. e., enrolled between winter semester 2016/17 and summer semester 2024) can complete their studies according to this curriculum until 30 September 2027 at the latest. After that, they will automatically be transferred to the 2025 curriculum. However, they can also switch to the new curriculum earlier by notifying the Office of Admissions.
Students who currently study according to the 2024 curriculum will also automatically be transferred to the new curriculum on 1 October 2025. This has no further consequences for you as, except for the new application procedure, the contents of the curriculum 2024 and the curriculum 2025 are identical (!). This means, of course, that the new application procedure does not apply to you.
Important information: All courses in the Master’s degree program in Political Science are taught in English.
The most important changes of the 2024 and 2025 curriculum
- The previous 4 thematic areas are reduced to 3. The previous thematic area of Democracy and Legitimacy will be integrated into Comparative Politics. As before, students must select 2 thematic areas as elective modules.
- A Professional Skills module is introduced as a new compulsory module, in which students can select two courses according to their interests or needs, which deal with advanced methods, practical orientation and/or academic writing.
- Another new feature is a cross-sectional module that is included in all degree programs at the University of Salzburg and is dedicated to socio-ecological crises, such as gender, sustainability and the climate crisis, democracy education, poverty or migration research.
- The Master’s thesis is now only assessed with 24 (instead of 30) ECTS points. This means that, compared to the previous curriculum, an additional course must be completed.
- In the future, the Master’s examination will no longer consist of the examination of material from the two PS Basic Texts in the two elective modules chosen by the students. Instead, students will have to present their Master’s thesis and answer questions from the examination board in the first part (so-called defensio). In the second part, students are questioned on a further topic unrelated to the topic of the Master’s thesis.
Links
MA Political Science (Curriculum 2016)
MA Political Science (Curriculum 2024 and 2025)
Courses in the academic year 2024/25 (BA and MA)
