Government 601: Methods of Political Analysis I

Fall 2004, Tueday 7:00-9:00p (WE 106)

Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
217 White Hall
255-3868
wrm1@cornell.edu
office hours: T 4:30-5:30, W 2-4 or other times by appointment

Assignment Due Dates
due date	description
October 26	``explanations'' paper
November 16	research pre-proposal
December 14	research proposal

Reading Availability

We will be reading large proportions of most of the following books, and most are worth having on the shelf, so you may want to buy them. On the other hand, several are expensive. Most of the books should also soon appear on reserve in the Government Reading Room in Olin (room 405). Photocopies of other required reading should also be available in the Reading Room.

Browning, Christopher R. 2000. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. New York: Cambridge UP.

Browning, Christopher R. 1998. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins.

Campbell, Donald T., and Julian C. Stanley. 1966. Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf.

Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedborg, eds. 1998. Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. New York: Cambridge UP.

King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Miller, Richard W. 1987. Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 1997. Contemporary Empirical Political Theory. Berkeley: U of California.

Reading schedule

Items with a bullet ($\bullet$) are required. Others are supplementary.

1. Goals of Political Science Research (Sept 7)
   • Miller. Fact and Method. Introduction and Chapter 1.

   • Monroe. Contemporary Empirical Theory. Chapters 1-4, 7, 9, 10, 12 (Easton; Gunnell; Grofman; Laponce; Zuckert and Zuckert; Riker; Hardin; Hartsock).

   • Salmon, Wesley C. 1998. Causality and Explanation. Oxford UP. Chapters 3 and 26.

   • Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage Books. Chapter 7.

   Almond, Gabriel A. 1990. A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

   Greenstein, Fred I., and Nelson W. Polsby. 1975. Handbook of Political Science, Volume 1: Political Science: Scope and Theory. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

   Ricci, David M. 1984. The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy. New Haven: Yale UP.

   Shively, W. Phillips. 1974. The Craft of Political Research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

2. Interpretations (Sept 14)
   • Salmon, Wesley C. 1998. Causality and Explanation. Oxford UP. Chapters 5 and 8.

   • Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Chapters 1 and 15 (``Thick description'' and ``Balinese cockfight'').

   • Wedeen, Lisa. 2002. ``Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science.'' American Political Science Review 96 (December): 713-728.

   Elster, Jon. 1993. Political Psychology. New York: Cambridge UP.

   Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1978. Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic.

3. Explanation, Mechanisms, Models, Theory (Sep 21)
   • Hedström and Swedborg. Social Mechanisms. Chapters 1-3, 5-8, 10 (Hedström and Swedborg; Schelling; Elster; Gambetta; Cowen; Kuran; Boudon; Sorenson).

   • Miller. Fact and Method. Chapter 2.

   Barry, Brian. 1978. Sociologists, Economists and Democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago.

   Schelling, Thomas. 1986. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton.

4. Individualism and Rationality (Sept 28)
   • Dixit, Avinash, and Susan Skeath. 1999. Games of Strategy. Norton. Chapters 1-5, 8.

   • Sen, Amartya. 1997. Choice, Welfare and Measurement. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Chapters 2 (``Behaviour and the Concept of Preference'') and 4 (``Rational Fools'').

   • Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. 1996. ``Explaining Interethnic Cooperation.'' American Political Science Review 90 (December): 715-735.

   • Miller, Gary, and Norman Schofield. 2003. ``Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States.'' American Political Science Review 97 (May): 245-260.

   Elster, Jon. 1984. Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

   Elster, Jon. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

   Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf.

   Morrow, James D. 1994. Game Theory for Political Scientists. Princeton: Princeton UP.

   Ordeshook, Peter C. 1986. Game Theory and Political Theory. New York: Cambridge UP.

   Gibbons, Robert. Game Theory for Applied Economists. Cambridge: MIT Press.

   Luce, R. Duncan, and Howard Raiffa. 1989. Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. New York: Dover Publications. Republication of Wiley, New York, 1957.

   Schelling, Thomas C. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

5. Causal Confirmation (Oct 5)
   • Miller. Fact and Method. Chapter 4.

   • Bates, Robert H., Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast. 2000. ``The Analytic Narrative Project.'' American Political Science Review 94:696-702.

   • Elster, Jon. 2000. ``Rational Choice History: A Case of Excessive Ambition.'' American Political Science Review 94:685-695.

   Bates, Robert H., Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast. 1998. Analytic Narratives. Princeton: Princeton UP.

   Green, Donald P., and Ian Shapiro. 1994. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. New Haven: Yale UP.

   Krüger, Lorenz, et al., eds. 1987. The Probabilistic Revolution. Cambridge: MIT.

   Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. Chicago: U of Chicago.

   Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. 1970. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

   Suppe, Frederick, ed. 1977. The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2d ed. Urbana: U of Illinois.

6. Trying to Demonstrate Intentions (Oct 19)
   • Bauer, Yehuda. 2001. Rethinking the Holocaust. Yale UP. Chapters 1, 2 and 5

   • Browning. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. Entire.

   • Browning. Ordinary Men. Chapters 17-18 and Afterword (pages 147-223).

   • Goldhagen. Hitler's Willing Executioners. Chapters 15-16 and Epilogue (hardcover pages 375-461).

   Ioanid, Radu. 2000. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

   Lindemann, Albert S. 1997. Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. New York: Cambridge University Press.

   Weiss, John. 1996. Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Chicago: I. R. Dee.

7. Basic Statistics (Oct 26)
   • Tufte, Edward R. 1974. Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Chapters 1-3.

   • Wonnacott, Thomas H., and Ronald J. Wonnacott. 1990. Introductory Statistics. 5th edition. New York: Wiley. Chapters 1-5.

   Tukey, John W. 1977. Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

   Gill, Jeff. Bayesian Methods: A Social and Behavioral Sciences Approach. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

8. Testing Explanations: Conditional Expectation and Experiments (Nov 2)
   • Campbell and Stanley. Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research. Entire.

   • Gilliam, Franklin D. Jr., and Shanto Iyengar. 2000. ``Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public.'' American Journal of Political Science 43:560-573.

   Cook, Thomas D., and Donald T. Campbell. 1979. Quasi-experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings. Chicago: Rand McNally College Pub. Co.

   Shadish, William R., Thomas D. Cook and Donald T. Campbell. 2002. Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

   Kinder, Donald R. and Thomas R. Palfrey, eds. 1993. Experimental Foundations of Political Science. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan.

9. Manipulation, Counterfactuals and Observational Studies (Nov 9)
   • Holland, Paul W. 1986. ``Statistics and Causal Inference.'' Journal of the American Statistical Association 81 (Dec.): 945-960.

   • Gerber, Alan S., and Donald P. Green. 2000. ``The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.'' American Political Science Review 94:653-663.

   • Imai, Kosuke. 2003. ``Do Get-Out-The-Vote Calls Reduce Turnout? The Importance of Statistical Methods for Field Experiments.'' Forthcoming. American Political Science Review.
     http://www.princeton.edu/~kimai/research/files/matching.pdf

   Brady, Henry, ``Models of Causal Inference: Going Beyond the Neyman-Rubin-Holland Theory.'' Available from
   http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/midx2003.pdf

   Dempster, Arthur P. 1988. ``Employment Discrimination and Statistical Science.'' Statistical Science, 3 (May): 149-161.

   Rosenbaum, Paul R., and Donald B. Rubin. 1983. ``The Central Role of the Propensity Score in Observational Studies for Causal Effects.'' Biometrika 70 (Apr.): 41-55.

   Rosenbaum, Paul R., and Donald B. Rubin. 1985. ``Constructing a Control Group Using Multivariate Matched Sampling Methods That Incorporate the Propensity Score.'' The American Statistician 39 (Feb.): 33-38.

   Rosenbaum, Paul R. 2002. Observational Studies. 2d ed. New York: Springer

10. Selection Biases (Nov 16)
    • Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge UP. Chapters 1-3.

    • Geddes, Barbara. 1991. ``How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics.'' Political Analysis 2:131-150.

    • Sekhon, Jasjeet S. 2004. ``Quality Meets Quantity: Case Studies, Conditional Probability and Counterfactuals.'' Perspectives on Politics. 2 (June): 281-293.
      http://jsekhon.fas.harvard.edu/papers/QualityQuantity.pdf

    David Collier and James Mahoney, ``Insights and Pitfalls: Selection Bias in Qualitative Research,'' World Politics, 49, 1 (October 1996), 56-91.

    Przeworski, Adam, and Henry Teune. 1970. The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: Wiley. Chapters 1-3.

11. Processes and Selection (Nov 23)
    • Collier, David, James Mahoney, and Jason Seawright. 2004. ``Claiming Too Much: Warnings about Selection Bias.'' Chapter 6 in Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry.

    • Brady, Henry E. 2004. ``Data-Set Observations versus Causal-Process Observations: The 2000 U. S. Presidential Election.'' Appendix in Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry.

    • Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. 2003. ``Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.'' American Political Science Review 90 (February): 75-90.

    • Mebane, Walter R., Jr. Forthcoming 2004. ``The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida.'' Perspectives on Politics (Sept.). MS available at http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/overvotes.pdf

    • Salmon, Wesley C. 1998. Causality and Explanation. Oxford UP. Chapter 7.

    Salmon, Wesley C. 1998. Causality and Explanation. Oxford UP. Chapter 16.

12. Generalities (Nov 30)
    • Selections from Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry.

    • King, Keohane and Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry.