Decoding Decisions

At Stony Brook, political science goes beyond politics — using data, psychology and real-world experience to understand how people shape the world.

By Rob Emproto

Growing up in Egypt as a dual citizen of the United States, Lana Gouda ‘26 witnessed humanitarian crises everywhere she looked. That experience instilled an early understanding of the importance of international diplomacy and public service.

Lana Gouda ‘26 appreciated how “academically diverse and supportive”
the Department of Political Science is. “My classes motivated me to explore other regions and political dynamics.”

“When I began studying political science, I immediately knew I wanted my concentration to be in comparative politics and international relations because I enjoyed exploring and devising solutions to prominent issues while maintaining a diplomatic stance and strengthening relations with our MENA (Middle East and North Africa) allies,” said Gouda, who is double majoring in political science and economics. “It gave me the tools to study real-world problems in a structured and analytical way.”

Though Gouda’s experience is uniquely hers, it typifies the wide swath the discipline of political science covers and the range of career applications in law, public policy and business it encompasses. Approximately 45,000 students graduate with a political science degree annually in the United States, making it one of the 20 most popular majors. The field has grown significantly, with total annual bachelor’s degrees conferred in the U.S. increasing almost sixfold between 1950 and 2019, according to Data USA, a public data analytical platform. There are currently more than 4 million people in the workforce with backgrounds in or touching political science. At Stony Brook, it’s the ninth most popular major, with nearly 8,500 Seawolves graduating in the discipline to date.

But what exactly is political science? Is it science? Is it politics? Or both?

A Broader Focus
“Many people think that political science is for people who want to go into politics, but that’s not what we do,” said Drew Engelhardt, an assistant professor in Stony Brook’s Department of Political Science. “I always say that’d be like asking a biologist if they wanted to be a reptile. Political science is the study of politics systematically, in the same way that a chemist studies chemical reactions or a biologist studies genetics. I think the biggest misconception is that political science is an applied discipline like public service, when it’s actually a much more systematic study.”

Drew Engelhardt (left) and Ryan Vander Wielen lead a discussion. Helping students learn to engage in healthy dialogues is a key skill.

Leonie Huddy, a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the department, said politics, by definition, is about disagreements, which many — especially today — find unpleasant. However, at Stony Brook, faculty explore it much more broadly, with a heavy influence of psychology.

“Our focus is on what we would call political behavior, primarily among ordinary people,” she said. “What’s relevant to a democracy? If we’re asking people to make political decisions, we need to understand how they make them. So, we look at political reasoning at the micro-level.”

This micro-level focus on individual behavior is a hallmark of the department’s unique academic identity. “Stony Brook’s program is special in the discipline because we’ve been at the forefront of thinking about political behavior and psychology,” said Ryan Vander Wielen, professor and chair of Political Science. “We have a long-standing reputation as being a rigorous, theory-driven, methodologically motivated department. It’s really shaped the way we think about things like emotions, identities and motivations.”

Vander Wielen added that the current state of American politics makes those topics increasingly relevant.

“To give an example, we used to think about polarization almost exclusively in an ideological sense,” he said. “But the contributions of our department are suggesting that’s not the relevant form of polarization. It’s the emotional distance between us and the animosity that comes about. So, really understanding those determinants becomes increasingly important to understanding what’s going on in the political world. Stony Brook has a unique vantage point to contribute to that conversation.”

Like his colleagues, Engelhardt also cites the influence of psychology on Stony Brook’s political science program.

“We focus on the ‘Why?,’” said Engelhardt, who joined the university in 2023. “What psychological motives do people have? Do they recognize them or not? We know that people make decisions [using mental shortcuts] and quickly, but then we can think about what shifts people to think a little bit more reflectively. And that’s what makes Stony Brook interesting and unique. And then we bring that to very specific topics like gender and politics. We can bring that to race and ethnic politics classes, and campaigns and elections. It’s a unique opportunity for undergraduates to learn how the same principles work in very different contexts.”

Top-Tier Training
That same commitment to rigorous, wide-ranging study extends to Stony Brook’s political science graduate program, ranked No. 33 nationally in 2025 by U.S. News & World Report and consistently placed among the country’s top 20 to 40 programs.

For doctoral candidate Nicole Huffman, the program offered a chance to cultivate their research interests and build methodological thinking skills.

“What I will carry most with me from Stony Brook’s program is how to refine a general idea or observation about the world into a research question that helps us better understand politics,” they said. “I also love how graduate students can dive into research early in the program.”

Huffman said they were drawn to political science as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. “I took a class in political psychology and was fascinated by politics as an area of psychology,” said Huffman, who credits Vander Wielen and Engelhardt as supportive mentors. “It combined many of my interests in social psychology, group identities and political issues.”

Matt Jacob ‘25, who is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Public Policy (MAPP), will be taking his experience in political science into the field of law when he begins his studies at Fordham University School of Law next fall.

“Being an engaged voter/citizen, I realized that having a broad intellectual background would help me stand out amongst other future attorneys,” said Jacob. “The availability and flexibility of course offerings at the master’s level make the MAPP program accessible to a wide variety of students, which creates a rich classroom environment with varied perspectives instead of an insulated one.”

Jacob said learning to speak in front of a crowd has been an invaluable skill as he prepares to enter law school. “Learning to be concise and confident in my delivery while coping with time pressures has been immeasurably important to my development,” he said. “Particularly the style mandated in classes offered by [adjunct lecturer] Richard Murdocco, like the three-minute hard limit. This is characteristic of public hearings and has been critical in cultivating brevity and ‘economy of thought’ in my presentations.”

Like Jacob, Lana Gouda found that the department’s versatility empowered her to explore the program’s wide range of opportunities. “Whether it’s research, teaching assistantships, scholarships, clubs or leadership opportunities, there’s something for everyone,” she said. “I also appreciate how academically diverse and supportive it is. My classes motivated me to explore other regions and political dynamics

“Through my classes, research experiences and involvement in the Political Science Society, I learned how to think critically, write clearly and approach complex political issues from multiple perspectives,” she said. “I also gained experience in research, public speaking and event organization, all of which I will carry into my career.”

Gouda credits Jason Rose, her thesis advisor, as a major influence on her academic success.

“From the very beginning, Professor Rose connected me with multiple alumni in fields I’m interested in, encouraged me to apply for competitive internships and nominated me for various opportunities,” she said. “His unwavering support, encouragement and belief in me were essential pillars of my journey at Stony Brook.”

After graduation, Gouda will join Wolfe Research, an independent equity research firm in New York City, as a research coordinator supporting research analysts. She will also remain a NextGen Initiative Fellow with Foreign Policy for America, a diverse community of emerging leaders committed to advancing principled U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.

State of Mind
As graduates like Gouda and Jacob prepare to apply what they’ve learned in the professional world, faculty like Leonie Huddy continue examining the underlying forces that shape how people think and behave in politics.

Leonie Huddy speaking at the “Studying Political Behavior in Turbulent Times” conference hosted by Political Science in June 2025.

Huddy, who has been with Stony Brook since 1988, said that understanding how people behave collectively when they form an identity as part of a group is critical to understanding the polarized political world we find ourselves in. “It’s insightful to analyze political attitudes and behavior as a form of social group behavior,” she said. “Groups can arouse heightened emotional reactions especially when members are threatened by outsiders as happens frequently in partisan politics.”

And also very psychological.

“For psychologists, group belonging and the desire to maintain group cohesion are basic human attributes,” she said. “And that’s what we bring into the department here at Stony Brook — a human perspective and understanding of political behavior. We approach the study
of political behavior through the lens of human psychology.”

In doing her work, especially as it relates to politics, Huddy said it’s important to separate “Leonie Huddy, the person,” from “Leonie Huddy, the social scientist.

“I work with data, and data is unforgiving,” she continued. “I have my own personal views, of course, but as a scientist, I try to understand what drives diverse political views. I am very aware that my assumptions can be wrong and I approach the analysis of data from a scientific, objective standpoint. That doesn’t mean my values aren’t there, but I have to analyze political behavior through the eyes of a researcher.”

Huddy said she is interested in every point of view and is constantly looking for patterns. “Whether I like the answer or not doesn’t matter. I have learned a lot about public opinion and political reasoning by staring at datasets and it’s sobering,” she said. “I always remind students to look beyond their bubble and take careful note of existing data to see the bigger political picture.”

Huddy said social media has been a big influence on the current generation of students.

“You can see the prevalence of virtue signaling on social media,” she said. “Our students live and die on social media. And there is a pervasive pressure to conform to prevailing social norms, making it more difficult for them to express differing viewpoints.”

Vander Wielen, who has been at Stony Brook since 2020, said recent politics and the way information is disseminated today have substantively changed what he studies.

“One of the interesting things about political science is that it evolves with the questions that confront society,” he said. “Questions like misinformation were not so central when I started my career. So substantively, I’ve started to engage a different set of questions. Polarization has become more central to the kinds of things that I study. What’s happening in the world has also been central to me thinking theoretically about how people approach politics.”

Vander Wielen added that technological evolution has affected the ways we are able to study these phenomena. “There’s been a tremendous development over the course of my career in terms of the types of methods we engage, and they’re becoming more and more sophisticated, and that’s exciting,” he said. “In the past several years, textual analysis, machine learning and causal inference methods, just to name some examples, have blown up, and that has allowed us to gain insight into some things we’ve never been able to gain traction on before. So as a researcher, a lot has changed in pretty dramatic ways, although for the world, that can be painful.”

Ultimately, Huddy said the goal is to encourage students to think critically and be prepared to interact with those who hold different perspectives. “Some people think that politics does not belong in the classroom, but that’s our bread and butter in political science,” Huddy said. “Our biggest gift to students is teaching them to think analytically and engage in discussion. We want them to see the other side and understand that there are valid viewpoints. What they learn is that much of life is about compromise.”