Political Science 204A

Political Science 204A, Fall 2007

Research Design

Meetings: (all in Social Sciences Building Room 104)

Lectures: Mondays, 9-10:30am

Discussion: Wednesdays, either 9-10:20 or 10:30-11:50

Professors:

Clark C. Gibson Thad Kousser

ccgibson@ucsd.edu tkousser@ucsd.edu

The primary text for this course is available at the UCSD bookstore for purchase:

Trochim, William and James P. Donnelly. 2007. The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 3rd Edition. Cincinnati, OH, Atomic Dog Publishing.

All other readings for this course will be made available on the course website (http://weber.ucsd.edu/~tkousser/PS204b.htm) or in the graduate student lounge.

You are expected to read all assigned materials and to be prepared to discuss them at the class meeting for which they are assigned. While each week has lecture and discussion sections, be prepared to discuss the readings at any time. There are four assignments for the course, due as noted on the syllabus below. Late assignments will not be accepted. Each assignment will be worth 15% of your total grade, and the remaining 40% will be based on your participation in classroom discussions. Laptops will not be allowed during class meetings, since you actually need to print the readings out to read them as actively as a course like this requires, and we will not be meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (November 21^st).

Week 1 (October 1 and 3): Science and the Scientific Method

Lecture readings:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapter 1

Discussion readings:

1. Schwartz, Thomas. 1980. The Art of Logical Reasoning. New York: Random House. Pp. 3-53.

2. Friedman, Milton, 1953. The Methodology of Positive Economics, in Essays in Positive Economics by Milton Friedman.

3. Weingast, Barry. 1979. A Rational Choice Perspective on Congressional Norms. American Journal of Political Science 23: 245-62.

Week 2 (October 8 and 10): Methods of Observation

Lecture (new version) Readings: Analogies Overheads

1. Geertz, Clifford. Thick Description. In Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

2. Curd, Martin and J. A. Cover. 1998. Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues.

New York: W. W. Norton. Chapters by Ruse, pp.38-47, Hempel and Snyder,

pp.445-480.

Discussion Readings:

1. Fenno, Richard. US House Members in Their Constituencies: An Exploration. Reprinted in Weisberg at. al.

2. White, Theodore H. 1961. The Making of the President, 1960. New York,

Atheneum Publishers. Chapters 1-3.

3. Katzenstein, Peter J. 1985. Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chapters 1-3.

Week 3 (October 15 and 17): Design, Validity, and Disconfirmation

Lecture Readings:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapter 7.

2. Cook, Thomas D. and Donald T. Campbell. 1979. Quasi-Experimentation:

Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Chapters 1 and 2.

Discussion Readings:

1. Campbell and Ross, “Connecticut Crackdown on Speeding,” Law and Society Review, 1968.

2. Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, et al. 2003. The Logic of Political Survival. MIT

Press. Chapters 2, 4-5.

3. Bartels, Larry. 2005. “Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind.” Perspectives on Politics 3:1, 15-31.

4. Lupia et al. 2005. "Were Bush Tax Cut Supporters 'Simply Ignorant?' A Second Look at Conservatives and Liberals in 'Homer Gets a Tax Cut.'"

Week 4 (October 22 and 24): Experimental Design

Lecture Readings:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapter 9

2. Donald R. Kinder and Shanto Iyengar, News That Matters, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, Chapter 2.

3. Green, Donald P. and Alan S. Gerber. 2002. Reclaiming the Experimental

Tradition in Political Science. In Political Science: State of the Discipline, ed. by

Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner. New York: W. W. Norton. Pp.805-32.

4. (recommended) Cook and Campbell, Chapter 8

Discussion Readings:

1. Lupia, Arthur and Mathew D. McCubbins. 1998. The Democratic Dilemma. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1-14, 101-148.

2. Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky. 1979. Prospect Theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263-292.

3. Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer. 2004. Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities. Econometrica 72:159-217.

4. “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from an India-wide Randomized Experiment,” Raghabendra Chattopadhyay NBER Working Paper 8615.

5. Sears, David O, 1986. "College Sophomores in the Laboratory: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology’s View of Human Nature." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51:515-530.

Assignment #1 due on October 29: Take a well known theory of politics. Derive from it a hypothesis that is testable though an experiment. Design the basic outline of an experiment to test the hypothesis you derived.

Week 5 (October 29 and 31): The Theory of Measurement and Sampling

Lecture Readings

Required:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapters 2, 3.

2. King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Chapters 4-5.

Discussion Readings:

1. Christenfeld N., Philips, DP, and Glynn LM. "What's in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols" Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 1999 Sep, 47(3): 241-54.

2. Gleditsch, Kristian, and Michael Ward. 1997. Double Take: A Re-examination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Politics. Journal of Conflict Resolution 41:361-83.

3. Przeworski also, Adam, et. al. 2000. Democracy and Development. New York:

Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1, pp. 13-77.

4. Gastil, Raymond. 1986. Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil

Liberties, 1985-1986. New York: Greenwood Press. Pp. 3-30.

5. Huber, John and Charles Shipan. 2002. Deliberate Discretion? The Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 44-77 and 171-83.

Assignment #2 due on November 5. Analyze the data provided on rule of law and assess its validity (Keefer data and description).

Weeks 6-7 (November 5 lecture, November 7 and 14 discussions): Quasi-Experimental Designs

Lecture Readings:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapter 10.

2. Cook and Campbell. Chapters 3, 5.

November 7 Discussion Readings:

1. Crosier, Scott. John Snow: The London Cholera Epidemic of 1854. (on course website).

2. Jared Diamond, “A Natural Experiment of History,” pp. 53-66 of Guns, Germs and Steel, W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.

3. Crook, Sara Brandes and John R. Hibbing, 1985. “Congressional Reform and Party Discipline: The Effects of Changes in the Seniority System on Party Loyalty in the US House of Representatives” British Journal of Political Science 15:207-226.

4. Posner, Daniel N. 2004. The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi.

American Political Science Review 98, 4 (November): 529-545.

November 14 Discussion Readings:

1. Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. 2001. The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development. American Economic Review 91: 1369-1401.

2. Donohue, John, and Steven Levitt. 2001. The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime. Quarterly Journal of Economics 116: 379-420.

3. Lake, David A. Hierarchy in International Relations: Authority, Sovereignty, and the New Structure of World Politics. Chapter 6. Manuscript.

4. Richard A. Berk and Jan de Leeuw 1999. “An Evaluation of California's Inmate Classification System Using a Generalized Regression Discontinuity Design,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 94, No. 448, pp. 1045-1052.

Assignment #3 due on November 19. Take an existing theory of politics. Derive a testable hypothesis from it. Design a quasi-experiment to test this hypothesis.

Week 8 (November 19 and 26): Qualitative Methods/Case Studies

Lecture Readings

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapters 6, 8.

2. King, Keohane, and Verba, Chapter 6.

3. Henry E. Brady and David Collier, editors, 2004. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Chapters 1-3.

Discussion Readings:

1. Gourevitch, Peter Alexis. 1978. The International System and Regime Formation: A Critical Review of Anderson and Wallerstein. Comparative Politics 10: 419-38.

2. Geddes, Barbara. 1994. Politician’s Dilemma. Building State Capacity in Latin America. Berkeley: UC Press. Chapters 1, 2, 5.

3. Dreze and Sen, “China and India” from Hunger and Public Action, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Assignment #4 due on December 3. Take an existing theory of politics. Derive a testable hypothesis from it. Design a case study to test this hypothesis.

Week 9 (November 28): Designing Validity

Readings:

1. Trochim and Donnelly, Chapters 11, 12.1.

2. Den Hartog, Christopher and Nathan W. Monroe. 2005. “The Value of Majority Status: The Effect of Jeffords’s Switch on Asset Prices of Republican and Democratic Firms.” Under review at Legislative Studies Quarterly.

3. Daniel E. Ho, Kosuke Imai, Gary King and Elizabeth A. Stuart, “Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Reducing Model Dependence in Parametric Causal Inference. Political Analysis, Vol. 15 (2007): Pp. 199-236.

4. Bratton, Michael and Nicolas van de Walle. 1997. Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3.

Week 10 (December 3 and 10): The Role of Science and Scientific Discovery

Readings for Guest Lecture on Weird (Political) Science:

1. James Fowler and Chris Dawes, “Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout.”

2. Darren Shreiber, “Political Cognition as Social Cognition: Are We All Political Sophisticates?” in Marcus, George E., W. Russell Neuman, Michael MacKuen, and Ann N. Crigler, editors The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior.

Discussion Readings:

1. Curd and Cover, Chapter 1: Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos; Chapter 2: Kuhn, Kuhn; Chapter 4: Lipton, Popper, Hempel.

2. Green, Donald and Ian Shapiro. 1994. Pathologies of Rational Choice. New

Haven: Yale University Press. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 8.

3. Cox, Gary. 1999. The Empirical Content of Rational Choice Theory: A Reply to Green and Shapiro. Journal of Theoretical Politics 11: 147-169.

462.

Special Bonus Week!!! Guest Starring Mat McCubbins, December 12^th, 9-10:30

Supplementary materials available on the Internet:

An excellent introduction to statistics and research design is Statistics at Square One --

http://bmj.com/collections/statsbk/index.shtml, see especially Chapter 5 --

http://bmj.com/collections/statsbk/5.shtml

Good websites on statistics, econometrics, including free downloadable software for data entry, data analysis, research design, hypothesis testing, document preparation and presentation include:

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html

http://members.aol.com/johnp71/javasta2.html#Freebies

http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/

http://www.american.edu/econ/notes/soft.htm

Online readings on the scientific method:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/lakatos//

http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/lecturelist.html

http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/AppendixE/AppendixE.html

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

http://www.brint.com/papers/science.htm

http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/Kuhnsnap.html

http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html