Politics and Policy Specialization

The Politics and Policy Specialization is intended for economics students who are interested in understanding how governments make decisions and how public policies are designed, implemented, and evaluated. It is particularly well suited for students considering careers in public policy, government, consulting, international organizations, law, or politics.

The specialization consists of five component parts:

1. Foundations of Economics: The economics core provides students with a rigorous foundation in microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, establishing the analytical language used throughout the degree. It develops disciplined economic reasoning about incentives, constraints, equilibrium, and efficiency that is essential for understanding both markets and policy outcomes. This shared foundation ensures coherence across specializations and allows students to engage confidently with advanced theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented coursework.
2. Foundations of Politics and Policy: The politics and policy core takes an explicitly political economy approach—applying the methods of economic analysis to the study of political institutions, collective decision-making, public policy, and governance. It equips students to analyze how policies are formed, implemented, and constrained by political incentives, power, and institutional structures, and the attendant normative trade-offs. As such, it bridges abstract economic models and real-world policy decisions.
3. Methods: The methods component provides students with formal tools for modeling economic and political processes, including mathematical, statistical, and game-theoretic techniques. It emphasizes precision, logical structure, and the ability to translate substantive questions into tractable analytical frameworks. This training allows students to engage deeply with theoretical work and to move fluidly between abstract models and empirical applications.
4. Empirical Analysis: The empirical analysis component trains students to evaluate economic and political questions using real-world data. It emphasizes econometric techniques, causal inference, and the interpretation of evidence, enabling students to test theoretical predictions and assess policy effectiveness. This component equips students with practical skills for research, policy analysis, and data-driven decision-making across both academic and applied settings.
5. Electives: The electives component allows students to tailor the degree to their individual interests within economics, political economy, and related fields. Students can deepen expertise in specific policy areas, empirical applications, or theoretical topics, or explore complementary perspectives from other disciplines. This flexibility encourages intellectual exploration while allowing students to integrate and apply the core tools of the degree to substantive questions they find most compelling. Electives are grouped into three bins that capture the distributional requirements embedded in the degree.

Read the Academic Catalog for more information about the specialization's requirements.