MA Governance, Politics and Policy (Research)

Fees for entry in 2027 have not yet been set. For reference, the fees for the academic year beginning September 2026 were as follows:

• MA (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £16,300
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £29,400

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

International student CAS deposit

Self-funded international applicants are required to pay a deposit of £2500 towards their tuition fees before a confirmation of acceptance for studies (CAS) is issued. Some applicants will be required to pay a higher deposit. More information on tuition fee deposits .

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

We know that student finance can be complicated. The links below provide further information to help guide you.

• Learn more about - student finance options for UK students .
• Learn more about - fees and finance for international students .
• Graduates of The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University can receive a 10% discount on their master's degree tuition fees as part of our Manchester Alumni Loyalty Discount scheme.

POLI60341 is designed to deliver a rigorous grounding in quantitative methods sufficient for independent use of such methods in MA dissertations or PhD research. It aims to offer a balanced mix of training, helping to prepare advanced students who want to engage in secondary data analysis in their MA dissertation or in doctoral research and have some experience of quantitative methods, but also aiming to provide a robust initial grounding who have not received extensive quantitative methods training prior to joining the MA..

POLI60341 is relevant for students with diverse academic backgrounds and interests who are interested in developing and applying quantitative methods.  It will teach students how to find relevant data for a range of research questions, and explore the limitations and common pitfalls of analysing quantitative data. For all those looking to understand and use data in politics masters and doctoral research, POLI60341 provides an essential step forward in the basic core skills of data evaluation and analysis, as well as introducing more complex statistical techniques that are not typically taught at undergraduate level. It is particularly designed to enable students to conduct work more independently, from finding their own data sources, analysing them and writing up the results for an independent research project. It will be taught using STATA - an advanced statistical software package that is more sophisticated and flexible than SPSS, the package typically used in UG quantitative methods courses

10 x 2 hour computer lab sessions

 

• Learn how to find, use and analyse quantitative data using the most popular quantitative data analysis techniques to answer questions driving political research, and how to write up the findings from such analysis
• Learn about how academics researching politics gather and use data, with guest lectures from various quantitative researchers in the department explaining how they apply particular techniques to solve particular research problems
• Learn about which questions can be answered with quantitative data and which cannot.

 

• Evaluate data from the point of view of quality, design and method of collection;
• Develop a critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of different methods of analysing data and applying the results of quantitative analysis to political research questions;
• Understand and analyse some of the central questions in politics research that have been addressed with the use of quantitative data;

• Develop a critical awareness of the use of data in political and media debate;
• Gain an ability to seek out relevant data sources

• Improve the ability to interpret and communicate quantitative findings in writing and verbally.
• Gain an exposure to widely used quantitative political science data sources
• Gain an ability to conduct a range of basic to intermediate data analysis techniques, including cross-tabulation analysis, graphical analysis and basic regression analysis
• Gain a working knowledge of STATA, the most widely used statistical software for applied quantitative analysis

Activity	Length required	Weighting
Four learning logs of c.250 words each: these will test your understanding of the statistical and analytical techniques we have learned, how to apply them, and how to interpret and write up results	1000 words in total	33%
End of course report: This report is a more extended piece of writing, where you will need to develop and motivate a hypothesis, explain the data and measures you will use to test it, then present and interpret an extended data analysis examining it. This should feature examples of data visualization (graphs), basic analysis (tables and cross-tabulation) and at least one form of statistical modelling (regression analysis).	2000 words in total	67%
Weekly workshop output: you will need to record your activities in each week’s workshop in a stata “do file”. These will be checked to ensure engagement with and understanding of the workshop activities, and formative feedback provided to help you with the learning logs and course report	n/a	formative