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
8/18)—Why are you taking this class, and what can you
expect to learn?
-
HPU requires faculty to show students this
security-related presentation (regarding what to do if
there is an active shooter event) on the first day of
classes: https://highpoint.canto.com/b/H7QQU
(Video length is 6:45.)
-
After class, please carefully read the documents
above so you are familiar with several resources that
you will want to consult multiple times during the
term.
Topic 2 (Wednesday 8/20,
Friday 8/22)—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:
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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 (8/25, 8/27, 8/29)—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 thinK. 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 separate studies to
find 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 build useful,
reliable 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.
Catch up if you haven't completed the other reading
assignments for this week. Remember to use the study
guide to help you stay focused on what you are supposed
to be getting out of the readings. You do *not* need to
read much of the assigned reading very closely if your
take the time to see in advance what I would like you to
review carefully.
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. 1, 3, and
5
For Monday (9/1):
-
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 (9/3):
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 (9/5) and continuing into Monday (9/8)
-
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 9
For Wednesday (Sept 10):
-
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 study
(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 purposefully written to 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 12):
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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.
What are the author's main findings? Are their any
obvious limitations to his research and findings?
What other methods (including qualitative social
science) could a researcher use to study the
relationship between religiosity and attitudes about
women as political leaders?
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Important: By this point in the course, you
have read many examples of social science research
that involves "controls." Almost all good social
science includes some type of control, so make
sure you understand and can explain what a control variable
is.
I am going to explain this concept in some
detail because it is one that past students have
sometimes struggled with. Most research in the
social sciences does not involve
researcher-induced experiments where one group of
individuals (or other units of analysis) receive a
stimulus while a "control" group does not; however,
a classical experiment is a good way to
think about what a control is and what it's purpose
is. The use of controls is how a researcher makes
sure that x causes y rather than something else
doing so. So, in a classical medical trial, some
individuals receive an experimental treatment, while
others receive a placebo. Typically, subjects have
been randomly distributed to the two groups, and--if
possible--the doctors who are treating the patients
have been randomly assigned members from the
treatment and placebo group. The idea with this
randomization is to make sure that patient and
doctor attributes are balanced out across the two
groups, so that those factors are "controlled" in
that they can't be the cause of any outcome we we
see only in the treatment group. Similarly, giving
the placebo to the otherwise untreated individuals
makes sure that the simple act of being treated by a
doctor--versus receiving the specific experimental
treatment--doesn't cause any change observed across
the two test groups.
When random assignment and exposure to a stimulus is
not an option--and in most social science research,
it is not--researchers can use other types of
controls, such as analyzing only subjects,
countries, or other units of a certain type, knowing
that any uniformly shared characteristics can be
ruled out as the cause of any differences observed
in the sample. The article you read on bribery in
Mexico, for example, described experiments that
involved only men in their 30s. This “most-similar
case study” approach allowed the researchers
to isolate the effect of social class—separate from
age or gender—on the likelihood of being asked for a
bribe. In experiments, researchers often control for
potential influences by ensuring that all subjects
are the same on certain factors. This way, they can
be confident that those factors are not responsible
for differences in outcomes. (In the Mexico study,
age and gender were held constant so the researchers
could focus specifically on socioeconomic status and
whether it affected the chance of being asked for a
bribe.)
In many of the studies you have read so far
(including Deane's study of fate, Whitt's study of
tribalism, and Setzler's study of Bolsonaro), the
authors have analyzed a large number of
individual-level observations using
"statistical controls" rather than only
studying one type of person. With this type of a
control, statistical programs like SPSS (which we
will use later in this class) isolate the influence
of an independent variable by comparing outcomes
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 the assumptions studied in the article you
read about corruption in Mexico City. If we were
analyzing the effect of income on the likelihood of
being asked by the police for a bribe, we would
could use survey questions that ask respondents both
about their income and whether they had been
solicited for a bribe. We could then control for age
by instructing the statistical program to compare
people within the same age group. If income (rather
than age) explained variation in police behavior, we
would expect to find that wealthy Mexicans are less
likely than poor Mexicans to be asked for a bribe at
every age. On the other hand, we might find that
older people generally have higher incomes, but when
comparing people of the same age, older Mexicans are
asked for bribes less often regardless of
socioeconomic status—while younger Mexicans are
asked more often regardless of status. In that case,
we would conclude that being young, not SES, is the
main factor shaping whether someone is asked for a
bribe.
Statistical controls are more complex in practice
than this simplified example, but this captures the
general idea of how researchers use them to isolate
the effect of a variable when multiple factors could
be influencing an outcome. Statistical controls are
the most common type of controls used in
contemporary political science, and something you
will be asked to use and interpret in statistical
exercises in the second half of this course.
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 15):
Concluding our overview of research design with a
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
(9/17):
For Friday (9/19). 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 22: 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.
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