Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Concentration

 

Department of Political Science

UC IRVINE

 

 

Political Economy/Public Choice

 

  

This is a brief introduction to faculty and other resources at UC Irvine for graduate study of Political Economy/Public Choice in the Department  of Political Science, leading to a Ph.D. in Political Science.  A parallel program exists in the UCI Economics Department for economics Ph.D. candidates with an interest in the economics of governance and public finance.  Both programs are jointly administered by a group of faculty from the two departments, and they have a year-long core course sequence in common. Additional support for the concentration is provided by the UCI Center for the Study of Democracy and the UCI Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences.

 

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UCI  faculty who are involved in the study of political economy and Public Choice represent a variety of perspectives, but they share a commitment to empirically grounded analysis and theory building,  and to the view that theirs is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of political science and economics, which draws on quantitative and mathematical tools to model the functioning of political institutions and processes.  Faculty and student interests range from applied areas of political decision-making such  as voter and party choice, electoral systems and constitutional design, regulation, lobbying and rent-seeking activities, and  issues in political economy such as central banking, trade, and taxation and income distribution;  to more purely theoretical and mathematical topics in social choice and social welfare theory and the theory of public goods.  Students normally choose to specialize in either more empirical or more formal areas of research.

 

The Ph.D. concentration in Political Economy/Public Choice is administered by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty, primarily from the Departments of Political Science and Economics.  This group includes some of the nation's leading scholars in the area, whose work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Economic Review, and other top journals.  Members include Linda Cohen, co-author of The Technology Pork Barrel, and past chair of the Department of Economics; Michelle Garfinkel, co-editor of The Political Economy of Conflict and Appropriation, and  former chair of the Department of Economics; Amihai Glazer, co-author of Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails, past chair of the Department of Economics, and editor of the journal, the Economics of Governance; Bernard Grofman, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past-president of the Public Choice Society and co-author of A Unified Theory of Voting and a Unified Theory of Party Competition; Marek Kaminski, author of Games Prisoners Play; Anthony McGann, junior author with Herbert Kitschelt of The Radical Right in Western Europe and author of Logic of Democracy; Michael McBride, a specialist in game theory; Donald Saari, member of the National Academy of Sciences, author of the Geometry of Voting, Decisions and Elections, and A Mathematician Looks at Voting; Stergios Skaperdas, co-editor of The Political Economy of Conflict and Appropriation, author of  Cooperation, Conflict and Power in the Absence of Property Rights, American Economic Review; Brian Skyrms, Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and author of Evolution of the Social Contract; and Carole Uhlaner, author of Rational Turnout - The Neglected Role of Groups, American Journal of Political Science, and The Acquisition of Partisanship By Latinos And Asian Americans, American Journal of Political Science.

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Students who elect to earn a Ph.D. degree in Political Science with a concentration in Political Economy/Public Choice  are admitted under the normal procedures for the program in Political Science and must fulfill all the requirements for the Political Science degree, with the following modifications:

 

 (1) Students must complete the core sequence (three courses) in Political Economy. Faculty from the Department of Political Science and from the Department of Economics teach this core sequence. Graduate students from  both economics and political science take this core sequence.  A background in economics equivalent to one year of microeconomics  is required for the last two courses in the sequence. Political science students normally take this sequence their second or third year. 

 

(2) Students must also complete three additional graduate courses out of a set designated by the interdisciplinary committee. The courses chosen will be tailored to the individual interests and academic background of the student.  Because of the close links between the Center for the Study of Democracy and the Political Economy/Public Choice concentration, one or two of these will normally be courses in the Democratization/Empirical Democratic Theory module.  Courses in economics might include public finance, economic development, or law and economics.  Other courses that would be appropriate include work in decision theory and game theory offered by various departments that can be taken in conjunction with the emphasis in Games, Decisions, and Dynamical Systems in the Program in Mathematical Behavioral Science. This aspect of the concentration is administered in conjunction with the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences.

 

(3) Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year-long sequence in econometrics, or other advanced work in statistics.

 

(4) Students are expected to write their dissertation on a topic related to Political Economy/Public Choice. Usually the dissertation advisor will be a Political Science member of the interdisciplinary committee.

 

Students in the concentration are eligible for special summer research fellowships and other research funding through the Center for the Study of Democracy and the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences.

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