4+4 PhD Programme

From the A-part to the B-part

Admission to the 4+4 programme requires a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and completed course work corresponding to 60 ECTS credits in Political Science at Master level. PhD students in the 4+4 programme must complete their Master’s degree within the first two years of the programme (i.e. during the first two years students are enrolled in the Master’s as well as the PhD degree programmes). If all requirements are fulfilled, students will achieve the Master’s degree. For the remaining two years, students are enrolled as PhD students only.

For students enrolled in the 4+4 PhD programme at Department of Political Science, the remaining 60 ECTS of the MSc degree consists of the following three elements:

  1. Complete PhD-courses or MA-courses amounting to 30 ECTS – the courses must be approved by the programme chair. 10 ECTS must come from completing the course on Social Science as a Craft offered by the department.
  2. Write an extended PhD project description for the entire PhD OR a monograph chapter addressing research question(s) and research design AND write one more chapter from the dissertation – for example a theoretical chapter if the dissertation will consist of a monograph OR an article that is close to being publishable if the dissertation consists of articles.

Based on 2, an oral exam will take place in the last month of the second year to complete the MSc part of the 4+4 programme.  

The objective of the Master thesis is to enable the student to:

  1. draft a well-defined problem statement and argue for the relevance and usefulness of this problem statement;
  2. identify relevant literature, extract the essence and argue for its relevance to the problem statement, and reflect on its strengths and weaknesses in relation to the problem statement;
  3. identify and apply relevant empirical and/or analytical methods and justify their relevance and limitations to the problem statement;
  4. adequately apply tools and methods to analyse the problems involved, evaluate and synthesize the obtained insights and results in a comprehensible way;
  5. demonstrate an ability to differentiate between essential and non-essential material;
  6. demonstrate critical reflections regarding the obtained results in relation to the problem statement, the methodology used and the literature and derive the most important conclusions of the analyses;
  7. apply a scientific, clear and concise language to present the analyses, both in the thesis and at the defence;
  8. at the defence, argue for the main premises and results in the thesis, and adequately respond to the comments made by the examiners

The Master thesis must be worked out individually.