5 Public Policy Course Programs

The global health major introduces students to global health as an area of study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. A synthesis of population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care, global health aims to reduce health disparities through attention to modifiable determinants of health and provision of sustainable health services and human development. As a field of study, global health has emerged from tropical medicine, public health, and international health to encompass the complex transactions between societies that are a defining feature of globalization. Because many global health problems stem from economic, social, environmental, political, and healthcare inequalities, defining these problems and designing solutions is highly interdisciplinary and involves fields that span across health sciences, medicine, and public health, but also that bridge to a broad range of other academic fields, including biology, agriculture, anthropology, business, computer science, engineering, environmental sciences, economics, history, law, psychology, public policy, and sociology, among others. To introduce students to this interdisciplinary field, the global health major integrates courses in the natural and social sciences and encourages students to take relevant electives in the humanities.

The field of political economy examines the many intersections of politics and markets, within and between countries. While applying a broad array of approaches, political economy emphasizes empirical analysis, while attending also to the context of history and theoretically and normatively significant claims about the way in which politics and markets work. Substantively, the field concerns interactions between economic and political development (does prosperity fuel democracy?); cooperation and conflict among nations, groups, and individuals (what causes civil war?); the distribution and redistribution of material resources and economic power (who gets what?); the effects of political actors and political structures upon economic outcomes (how do autocracies promote growth?); the effects of economic actors and economic structures upon political outcomes (how does inequality foster corruption?); the political causes and consequences of technological and structural change, growth, and globalization (how do party systems integrate new issues?); and the politics of regulation, market interventions, and global governance (how can policy address climate change?). Students can choose among three disciplinary tracks: Economics, Political Science, or Public Policy.

The Institutions and Governance major enables students to study the formal and informal rules that societies use to govern themselves at the local, national, and global levels. By focusing on institutions and governance as a guiding framework, students can better understand the dynamics of wealth and poverty, innovation versus technological/economic stagnation, and stability versus turmoil in different states and societies, as well as exploring the dilemmas and questions raised by different conceptions of a just society. Students in this major will be exposed to the deep political science, economic, sociological, historical, anthropological, and normative explorations of institutional designs in a variety of constructs, such as governments, interest groups and social movements, media, and religion, among others.

The United States of America is a nation of paradoxes best understood through seeing its place in the world. Born in the era of transatlantic revolutions beginning in the late eighteenth century, the US was founded on ideals of individual liberty, yet has had to grapple with its other undemocratic foundation in African slavery and Indigenous dispossession. As a nation that, on principle, has eschewed and isolated itself from the empire-building practices of other great powers, the US sometimes implicated itself, in those very same practices, eventually becoming itself a global power.

How does the American political system work? Who are some of the key actors? What are key concepts for a student trying to understand what’s going on? How can I as a citizen influence politics? Civic Engagement in American Democracy takes on these and other key questions. This course will provide you with a strong foundational introduction to U.S, politics.