In addition to the foundation course in public policy required of all students, elective courses in this field include policy evaluation, organizational decision making, bureaucracy, regulation, and social choice theory as well as advanced policy courses including international trade, urban politics and economic development, and tax compliance. The Department of Economics and the W. Averell Harriman School of Management and Policy at Stony Brook provide additional courses on policies and political economy. Our faculty have published research on issues such as the economic development of metropolitan areas, political controls over regulatory bureaucracies, economic influences on elections and citizen responses to tax policies. A sample of other ongoing research projects in which incoming students may become involved include tax evasion, from the government's and citizen's perspective, protectionism in international trade, and state regulation of business. Students are trained in topics and methods associated with psychology as well as political science.
Methodological concerns focus on experimentation.
In addition to formal training in experimental methods, students are apprenticed throughout their course of training to ongoing laboratory research projects. Students become familiar with the department's extensive and well-equipped laboratories and the regular subject pool. Since we believe that a strong background in research methods will be essential for political scientists in the 1990s, we provide a rigorous training in the application of statistical methods and formal models to political analysis. Coursework in analytic methods includes introductory training in mathematical methods and statistics as well as more advanced modeling, econometric, measurement and time series analysis. We believe, however, that it is the application of research methods, first as part of faculty and class research projects and then in your own dissertation research, that makes you a competent researcher with the skills required for success in research and academic careers.