Policy Science

Troubling global issues challenge the aspirations and often very existence of human civilisation. Underdevelopment, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and mismanagement of political, economic, and social forces either have led to negative results for human welfare, fairness, justice, and peace. The structuring of social relations with public, private, community, and private policies is the primary tool that has been a foundation of many sustainable answers to these challenges. More systematic and sophisticated approaches to understanding policy have become increasingly influential to the point of becoming the norm in many societies and international organizations.

Students of this major examine the challenges of policymaking and policy design in order to better understand the organisational and political origins of many global challenges, and thus are better positioned to develop possible solutions. The development of policy strategies to find policy solutions to global challenges requires an integration of social scientific insights, methods and solutions from across disciplinary fields including political science, public policy, public administration, economics, psychology, sociology, the biological and other exact sciences, history and political and economic thought. Evaluating the goals that policy-makers wish to attain from moral, ethical, and other normative perspectives is an essential first and final step of policy making, and it requires a key integration of social scientific and humanistic inquiry. Evaluating policy outcomes, the decision-making process itself, and engaging with key policy debates necessitates to an increasing degree a firm grasp of quantitative data and analysis. Thus, the policy science major includes coursework in quantitative methodology and analytical frameworks from across the social, biological, and computational sciences, along with drawing on work in psychology, sociology, and the biological sciences.

Methodology courses:
Quantitative Research Methods,
Decision Making Processes