Political Economy/Public Choice and Methodology

Political Economy/Games and Decisions/Public Choice

The set of faculty who teach courses in these areas, including two members of the National Academy of Science, a past President of the Public Choice Society and past Chairs of the Economics Department at UCI, make UCI one of the premier places in the world to study formal modeling. Four Department faculty (Bernard Grofman, Marek Kaminski, Anthony McGann, and Carole Uhlaner), are very active scholars in the fields of political economy and public choice and do work in the area of games and decisions. They are joined by six economists (Linda Cohen, Amihai Glazer, Michelle Garfinkel, Michael McBride, Stergios Skaperdas, and Donald Saari) and one philosopher (Brian Skyrms) in coordinating courses and research training for students who are interested in these topics under the joint umbrella of the UCI Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences and the Center for the Study of Democracy.

The Economics and Political Science Departments jointly offer a concentration in public economy and public choice. The Department faculty 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 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.

For more information on graduate training in games and decisions/political economy/Public Choice <click here>.

	Bernie Grofman has over 200 publications, including, most notably, A Unified Theory of Voting (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Legislative Term Limits: Public Choice Perspectives (Kluwer, 1996). In 2001-2002, Grofman served as president of the Public Choice Society.
	Marek Kaminski teaches game theoretic modeling at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, which is also the basis of a number of his publications.
	Anthony McGann works on models of collective decision-making and party competition, with application to European party systems. He also teaches graduate quantitative methods courses.
	Carole Uhlaner works in the field of comparative political behavior and often uses mathematical and formal approaches in her graduate teaching as well as research.