Please note: At your instructor's discretion,
there may be minor alterations to the reading
assignments listed below. One of the major advantages to
providing you with an on-line readings archive is that
timely articles can be added or substituted when
appropriate. Opening documents downloaded from this
website will require that your computer have
Acrobat Reader . You will also need the
class-specific password to open individual files.
UNIT 1 ASSIGNMENT SCHEDULE
Links to helpful
resources:
Week 1
Topic 1 (Monday
8/19)—Why are you taking this class, and what can you
expect to learn?
Topic 2 (Wednesday 8/21,
Friday 8/23)—What is "empirical" research, and what
kinds of questions do political scientists seek to
answer?
Ahead of class on Wednesday:
-
Take a look at what studies have been published in American
Journal of Political Science : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15405907/current.
Read through a handful of abstracts (follow the
abstract link to see a quick summary; do no read full
articles). If you are an INR major, look at recent
studies that examine other countries or internal
issues. PSC majors, take a look at anything of
interest.
For Friday:
-
Read quickly chapter 3 in your textbook. The
main reason for asking you go through this reading
during the first week in the class is that doing so
will help you to begin to absorb vocabulary and
concepts that will come up throughout the course. We
will cover all of the concepts identified in the
chapter multiple times, and get to some of them this
coming week. You will be asked to read the chapter
again.
Read the chapter sections on "dependent" and
"independent" variables very closely. Also carefully
review the sections on how researchers frequently look
for "correlations" between independent and dependent
variables to test their "expectations" (that is, their
"hypotheses") to "explain" (that is, to test their
hypotheses to see if the correlations confirm their
theory) about the relationship between independent and
dependent variables. For the section on "variable
measurement," you can skim the sections about and
definitions of "nominal," "binary," (also called
"dummy), "ordinal," "interval," and "ratio" variables.
We'll talk a lot about these throughout the term, but
these are concepts we'll begin to talk about in the
coming weeks.
-
Read an article by Madison Deane '2024
(Just read up to the findings section; we'll go
over the findings and conclusions in class). Bring
a copy of the article to class so you can reference
it. You are used to reading course assignments
to walk away with their main conclusions and evidence.
Here, I want you to focus on the article's methods and
how the author goes through each of the steps outlined
in Chapter 1 of your textbook. The reading from
chapter 3 will give you some of the vocabulary you
will need to navigate this research article. You
aren't expected to understand everything in this
article--it is written for an academic journal whose
readers mostly have advanced research methods
training, but do your best to answer these questions:
Week 2
Topic 3 (8/26, 8/28, 8/30)—Why do we want to study
politics "scientifically"? What do we give up when we
focus most of our effort on being empirical rather than
political or normative in our approach to understanding
politics?
For Monday
-
If you were waiting for your book to arrive last week
and didn't complete the assignment, read though your
textbook's chapter three (a copy of that chapter is in
a folder in the PPTs folder). Why are you reading this
chapter so important? I want you to be familiarizing
yourself with the basic concepts--theory, hypotheses,
and different types of variables--used in social
science research. If you don't understand these terms,
it will be hard to grasp what the sample articles we
are reading are trying to show.
-
John R. Bond, "The Scientification
of the Study of Politics" (Journal of
Politics, 2007, 11p). This is a difficult reading (it
was written for a leading political science journal).
Just skim the specifics on the books and articles he
mentions, so that you have a general understanding of
the context he's writing about. Concentrate on when
and why political science moved towards mostly being
an empirical social science and some of the debates
over that shift. What makes the present-day discipline
of political science "scientific," and what's the
alternative? How does Bond know and demonstrate when
political science (and sociology and international
relations) became more scientific? You don't need to
know specifics, but be familiar with the main
arguments.
For Wednesday
-
Be warned that this outtake from the John Oliver show
is crass in places, but it goes over lots of concepts
that you will find helpful to getting the most you can
out of your other readings this week. Ignore anything
not related to how science is used and reported on in
the US
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw.
I am assigning this content because Oliver is funny
enough to help you remember some key ideas about how
some social scientists produce studies that aren't as
reliable as you might thing. Here are some questions
to guide your viewing:
What is p-hacking? Why is there so little replication
in the sciences, let alone the social sciences? What
are some of the factors that lead to separate studies
finding opposing results? Why do findings so often get
distorted when when they are publicly disseminated?
Does all of this mean that we just can't really build
knowledge through the scientific approach?
For Friday
-
Review chapter three in your textbook, reading it
more carefully this time. Make sure you understand the
different types of variables Forestiere defines and
discusses. One key type of variable not discussed in
the chapter are control variables. This
coming week, you will be reading about two types of
control variables.
Weeks 3 and 4
Topic 4—How to you turn an interesting
question into a doable research project?:
Operationalizing a study's theories, hypotheses and
causal arguments
Week 3: Sept. 2, 4, and
6
For Monday (9/2):
-
Read Chp. 4 in Carolyn Forestiere's Beginning
Research in Political Science (Your textbook). Read
most of this chapter very closely. This material
covers most of the key research-design concepts and
terms used by social scientists, regardless of whether
they are using quantitative or qualitative methods.
The chapter illustrates these concepts with a
chapter-length example. Be familiar with each element
of that example. You do not need to read the "Examples
from Political Science" section here. We are looking
at article-length examples in the other reading
assignments and class.
-
Read this Wall Street Journal article,
focusing on the methodology (mostly experiments)
social scientists are using to examine political
polarization and its consequences. Specifically, how
are the social scientists operationalizing their
variables to test the idea that Americans are using
political information in their daily lives in tribal
ways, that is to favor copartisans and punish folks
who identify with the other party? Why might
experiments be a better way to examine polarization
than just asking people what they think about
different types of partisanship (there is a chart that
looks at this, too, in the article)?
For Wednesday (9/4):
This is a tough reading that
was not written for an undergraduate audience. Do not
spend great energy and time reading the results or
information about the study's statistics closely.
Instead, look at the main
sections of the article to get a sense about how published
social science studies typically are organized. See if you
can identify the study's main research questions, the
study's hypotheses, and its general findings.
Focus on the methods. What
kind of survey did the authors use? How did they measure
different elements of tribalism with "games," and what
evidence do they provide to suggest that perhaps tribalism
can be reduced (i.e., how do they test hypotheses related
to "contact theory?)?
Review the big-picture
takeaways? How did tribalism in the US as of 2019 compare
to what other scholars had reported in earlier years? How
did divisions as of 2019 compare to what Dr. Whitt has
found in his studies of other international areas?
-
Here are the experiments that
approximately 1,200 Americans answered in this study
(the description of them in the article is very brief
because this journal has rigid guidelines on how long
an article can be). Read through them quickly. We'll
examine them in class, too.
For Friday (9/6) and continuing into Monday (9/9)
-
Read closely parts of Chp. 5 in Carolyn Forestiere's
Beginning Research in Political Science (Your
textbook). For now, read the introduction of the
chapter, skipping all of the sections on sampling (pp.
91-99 will be assigned next week). Then, read the
section "Revisiting the different types of research
design" through the end of the chapter.
-
Are their any obvious limitations to their research
and findings? For example, the article's title
suggests that this study advances our understanding
of how "inequality" influences "corruption" in
"Latin America," but how reasonable is this claim
considering the actual experiment they use and
unique qualities to their case study (i.e., some
road intersections in Mexico City)?
Week 4: Sept.
11, and 13
For Wednesday (Sept 11):
-
Read (please print it out, too, and bring it to
class): Mark Setzler, "Did Brazilians Vote
for Jair Bolsonaro Because They Share his Most
Controversial Views?" Use the appropriate
link to download a pdf-version of the full article.
Although this article uses pretty advanced statistical
methods, I assign it because it is pretty short
(that's what a "research note" usually is), and it was
written to be easily accessible to an audience that
includes undergraduate social science majors.
Brazilian Political Science Review is published by the
leading academic organization for political scientists
in Brazil and publishes all work in English to make it
accessible to the widest audience possible. As a
reminder, the main reason you are reading some works
written by your instructor is because the assigned
studies were written with HPU students in mind and
mostly use only the same statistical techniques we
teach in PSC 2019 and the department's 4000-level
courses. The other reason you are being asked to read
this article is so that you can focus on how scholars
create variables from survey questions to measure
things like, how sexist a voter is or how much they
support democracy.
As you read, consider the questions listed for the
last reading as well as the following:
-
What variables are used to test the main two
theories for why Brazilians voted for Bolsonaro
(controversial issues vs. standard issues)? What hypothesis is
the author most interested in (hint: it is noted in
the article title)? What theory represents the null hypothesis?
Notice that the author doesn't use control
variables because he basically groups them into the
second hypothesis, which is that the "standard"
issues explain Bolsonaro's election. If he had only
been testing the hypothesis that voters' with
illiberal beliefs were more likely to vote for
Bolsonaro, variables like gender, age, education,
income, ideology, etc., would have still been used
in the article's regression models as controls. Why?
Because each of them could be correlated to the main
independent variables in the study and the
probability of voting for Bolsonaro.
For Friday (Sept 13):
-
What is the central research question? What is the
basic set-up of the two types of research he uses
(specifically, why does the author not only look at
religiosity in Latin American but patterns in four
specific countries, too)?
-
What are the control variables in this
study? The main argument being tested is that voters
share the controversial views of the politicians
they support. This means that the "standard" issues
variables are acting as controls in this case.
Important note, you need to make sure you
understand what a control variable is. The
article you read on bribing in Mexico included
experiments that included only with men in their
30s. This "most similar case study" approach allowed
the researchers to isolate the effect of a person's
class, versus their age or gender, on their
likelihood of being asked for a bribe. In
experiments, researchers often control for other
potential influences on an outcome by making sure
that all of their subjects are exactly the
same on some factors so that they know that these
factors are NOT causing different outcomes (the
controls in the Mexico study were age and gender,
which didn't vary so the researchers could "isolate"
a person's socioeconomic status on whether they are
asked for a bribe).
In most of the studies you have been asked to read
so far in the class, the authors are analyzing a
large number of observations and using statistical
controls. Statistical analysis programs isolate the
influence of an independent variable by looking at
across different clusters of a control variable. For
example, we could use a well-known, recurring survey
of Mexican public opinion--the AmericasBarometer--to
reexamine what the authors studied in Mexico city.
If we were statistically analyzing the effect of
income on being asked by the police for a bribe, we
would use questions in the 1500-person survey
dataset that asks each respondent about these two
things. We could control for age by instructing the
stats program to cluster respondents by responses to
an item asking respondent's their age. If
income--rather than age--explains how the police
treat Mexicans, we would expect to find that rich
Mexicans are less likely to be asked for a bribe
than poor Mexicans at every age. On the other hand,
we might find that older people tend to have more
money, but when you compare people grouped by age,
older Mexicans get asked less for bribes regardless
of SES while younger Mexicans get asked for bribes
more ofent regardless of status. If this were the
case, we would say that being younger is a major
cause being asked for a bribe while SES is not.
Statistical controls are somewhat more complicated
than what I have just laid out, but this is the
general idea of what is going on when we use
statistical programs to isolate the effect of a
variable on an outcome when multiple factors could
be in play.
So, when does a study need a control? Whenever you
think that there may be something else that could be
influencing the independent and dependent variable.
In medical studies, for example, people might get
better if they think they are taking a medicine to
improve their health. To make sure that it is the
new drug that is resulting in better health
outcomes, scientists give some of their sample a
placebo (a fake drug that does nothing); by doing
so, .
Week 5
For Monday (Sept 16):
Workshop day
-
In class, you will work in teams to design a research
study or two. If you had ample resources at your
disposal and could collect original data, what kind of
"mixed methods" (in this case, quantitative and
qualitative) research would you use to study a
political or economics research question that seems
interesting to you?
Topic 5 —Surveys
and samples--studying a relatively small number of
people to make accurate inferences
about much larger "universes”
For Wednesday
(9/18):
For Friday (9/20). It may seem like a
lot of readings are listed here, but these collectively
add up to less reading than a textbook chapter. Each
piece is the equivalent of a short textbook chapter
section. Use the focus questions to guide your reading.
-
Which subgroups were over-sampled? Specifically,
Pew invited extra individuals from several
subgroups whose members are less likely than other
individuals to participate in surveys or because
they wanted researchers to have access to a
subgroup samples that more accurately reflected
these subgroups overall.
-
How do Pew analyses of their surveys deal with
the fact that even the most carefully created
random samples typically do not mirror their
target population exactly because different types
of people are more or less likely to accept
invitations to participate. To deal with this
issue, researchers typically apply post-hoc (i.e.,
after-the fact) weights that use parameters from
the Census or other massive, high-quality surveys.
Specifically, researchers' data analyses typically
under-weight or over-weight the responses of
different types of individuals based on whether
their were too few or too many respondents of each
type in the sample relative to their share of the
larger population. In Pew's case, they used
population parameters to determine who would
participate in their survey and--because they
purposefully oversampled some groups--they also
use post-hoc weights.
Week 6
Monday, September 23: In-class Exam 1.
The exam will contain 10-15 multiple choice and several
short-essay items. If you have previously approved
arrangements with OARS for extended or distraction-free
testing time, you must contact them a week in advance to
ensure that you can take the test is the OARS testing
facility. In booking a room, your exam must start at the
same time as our class begins; any exceptions to this must
be pre-approved by me.
Topic 6 (Wednesday
and Friday, Sept. 25, 27, after the test): Is
political polling getting better over time? Can we
still trust surveys to determine what Americans think
about contentious issues?
-
Stef W. Kight and Margaret Talev: "Study: What Americans really think"
(Axios 2022, 3pp.) This article uses the
phrase "self silencing" to refer to what social
scientists refer to as "social desirability bias."
What is a list experiment? How does it tackle the
problem of this type of bias? While we know that
people don't always admit to their prejudice against
other group, what does this article (and data in class
PPTs) say about how widespread social desirability
bias is?
The next several articles discuss how political polling
has improved over the last several elections. It looks
like a lot of reading but together, it adds up to less
than 15 pages.
-
Geoffrey Skelley, Why Was The
National Polling Environment So Off In 2020?
(FiveThirtyEight, 2021, 3-4pp). How far off are polls
from estimating actual turnout and vote choice in the
typical election? What is non-response bias? This
article doesn't talk about it, but what are some of
the factors that might cause the supporters of Donald
Trump to be more or less likely to take a survey than
Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans who
don't support him?
-
Andrew Fischer, "Polls Were Great in
2022. Can They Repeat Their Success" (NY Times,
2pp). What are polls doing to get better? How has
adjusting polls to make sure that they have an
proportionally accurate share whites and non-white
individuals without a college education and
respondents who voted for Trump in the previous
election improved polls' predictions.
-
You might be interested in reading more (i.e., this
is optional, but only because it is so detailed) about
how accurate political polling typically is and
whether there is a political bias to polling (when
large numbers of surveys are combined, there typically
isn't, especially if you weight for "house effects,"
which fivethirtyeight.com does): https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-election-polling-accuracy/
We finished up Unit 1 when we took its exam. I posted
materials for the rest of the week on this schedule so you
would know what we would be doing right after the exam. As
we continue with Unit 2, head back to the course homepage
and open up the Unit 2 schedule.
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