Course: POLS265 Political Data Analysis
(Paradigms and Perestroika)
Semester: Fall 2006
Time: MW 10:00-11:30 am
Room:
Instructor:
Office: Social Work 212
Hours: T 10-11:30 am or by appointment
Description: This course invokes renewed emphasis in the discipline of Political Science on methodological pluralism. In that spirit, it introduces students to a variety of different ways in which to gather data in order to make knowledge claims about politics. Data are construed broadly to encompass qualitative information as well as quantitative. Methods range from historical contextualization to experiments, surveys, field studies and even interpretations of texts and images. The course surveys major methodological approaches to studying politics with an eye toward enhancing the capacity to decide when and how such approaches might work best given the subjects under study. The course starts with the idea that the topic should determine the methods used rather than the other way around. It ends with consideration of how triangulation, as in the case of employing multiple methods to study the same topic, can help strengthen the resulting knowledge claims. A series of exercises provide opportunities for students to begin to practice different research methods and to assess their value in the production of political knowledge.
Texts Available for Purchase at the College Bookstore:
Earl Babbie,
The Basics of Social Research, 3rd
Edition (Wadsworth Group, 2005).
Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist
Methods in Social Research (Oxford University Press, 1992).
Course readings other than the texts available at the bookstore can be accessed electronically at the course webpage on Blackboard at: http://blackboard.brynmawr.edu.
Assignments:
Students are required to complete 5 short research exercises over the course of
the semester. On five occasions during the semester, instructions will be
distributed in class for students to choose each time from among a number of
methods to engage in an exercise related to research and data analysis.
Evaluation:
Students’ performance in the course will be evaluated as follows:
Class participation 25%
5 Data Exercises 75% (15% each)
TOTAL 100%
Course Outline:
PART I: General Themes
9/4 Introduction
9/6 Paradigms and Perestroika: Methodological Pluralism in Political Science Today
D.W. Miller, "Storming the Palace in
Political Science: Scholars Join Revolt Against the
Domination of Mathematical Approaches to the Discipline, Chronicle of Higher
Education,
Ian Shapiro, “Problems, Methods, and
Theories in the Study of Politics, or What's Wrong with Political Science and
What to Do about It,” Political
Theory, 30 (August 2002): 596-619. Click here.
9/11 Structuring Research from a Positivist Perspective of Explaining Causality
Babbie, Chapters 1-3.
Robert A. Pape, “The Strategic
Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97,
3 (August 2003): 343-361. Click here.
James
D. Fearon, “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis
Testing in Political Science,” World
Politics, 43 (January 1991): 169-195. Click
here.
9/13
Babbie,
Chapters 4-6.
Barbara Harff, “No Lessons
Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass
Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97, 1 (February 2003): 57-73. Click here.
9/18 Structuring Qualitative Research from an Interpretivist Perspective of Understanding Meaning
Babbie,
Chapter 10.
Reinharz, Chapter 1-2.
9/20
Ann Chih Lin, "Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist
Approaches to Qualitative Methods," Policy Studies Journal 26, 1
(1998): 162-80. Click
here.
Todd Jick, "Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Methods: Triangulation in Action," Administrative Science Quarterly 24, 4 (1979): 602-11. Click here.
PART II: Data Collection and
Analysis Exemplified
9/25 Quantitative Analysis: Exemplifying Problems in Prediction and Causation
Joe Soss, Sanford F. Schram, Thomas
P. Vartanian, and Erin O’Brien, "Setting
the Terms of Relief: Explaining State Policy Choices in the Devolution
Revolution," American Journal of Political Science 45 (2001):
378-95. Click
here.
Janet C. Gornick and Marcia
K. Meyers, “Lesson-Drawing in
Family Policy: Media Reports and Empirical Evidence about European
Developments,” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 3,1 (June 2001): 31-57. Click here.
Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, “New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries, 1975–95,” American Political Science Review 97, 3 (August 2003): 425-446. Click here.
9/27 Predicting Political Behavior through Survey Research
Babbie, Chapter 9.
Reinharz, Chapter 4.
10/2
Donald Kinder and Nicholas Winter, "Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites and Opinion on National Policy," American Journal of Political Science 45, 2 (April, 2001): 439-56. Click here.
Mark
Peffley, Mac Avery, and Jason Glass, "Race
Matters: The Impact of News Coverage of Welfare Reform on Public Opinion,"
Race, Welfare, and the Politics of Reform,
10/4 In-Class Data Analysis on Quantitative Data
UC-Berkeley Social Science Data Archive
UMich ICPSR
SETUPS on Voting Behavior
US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey
10/9
10/11 Predicting Political Behavior through Experimental Research
Babbie, Chapter 8.
Reinharz, Chapter 5.
Edward Schatz and Irwin J. Schatz, “Medicine and Political
Science: Parallel Lessons in Methodological Excess,” PS: Political Science &
Politics 36, 3 (July 2003): 417-422. Click here.
FALL BREAK
10/23 Experimental Research Exemplified
Tali Mendelberg, "Executing Hortons:
Racial Crime in the 1988 Presidential Campaign," Public Opinion Quarterly
61, 1 (1997): 134-57. Click
here.
Devah Pager,
“The Mark of a Criminal Record,”
The American Journal of Sociology
108, 5 (March 2003): 937-76. Click here.
10/25
Neo-Institutionalisms
Adam Przeworski,
“Institutions Matter?” Government
and Opposition 39, 4 (September 2004): 527-40. Click here.
Theda Skocpol, "Why I am a
Historical-Institutionalist," Polity 28
(Fall 1995): 103-6. Click here.
10/30 Historical-Institutionalism and Macrosocial Inquiry: Contextualizing Comparisons
Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, "The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry," Social Revolutions in the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 72-95. Click here.
Ellen M. Immergut, "The
Roles of the Game: The Logic of Health Policy-making in
11/1 The Logic of Case Studies
Reinharz, Chapter 9.
James
C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), pp. 1-52. Click here.
David Laitin, “Book Review--Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30, 1 (1999) 177-179. Click here. Timothy J. McKeown, “Case Studies and the Limits of the Quantitative Worldview,” in Henry Brady and David Collier eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham , MD
11/6 Interpretive Analysis and Field Studies: The Case of Ethnography
Reinharz, Chapter 3, 7.
Lorraine Bayard de Volo
and Edward Schatz, “From the Inside Out: Ethnographic Methods in
Political Research,” PS: Political Science & Politics 37, 2 (April 2004): 417-422. Click here.
Marc Howard Ross, “Culture and
Identity in Comparative Political Analysis,” Comparative Politics: Rationality, Structure, and Culture, Mark
Irving Lichtbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 42-80. Click
here.
11/8
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph,
“Engaging Subjective Knowledge: How Amar
Singh’s Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity
Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 1, 4 (December
2003): 681-694. Click here.
11/13 Interpretive Analysis and Field Studies: Going In-depth, Interviewing and Participant Observation
Joe Soss, “Talking
Our Way to Meaningful Explanations: A Practice-Centered View of Interviewing
for Interpretive Research.,“ in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine
Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and
Method (
Howard S.Becker,
"Problems of Inference and Proof in Participant Observation," American
Sociological Review 23 (1958): 652-660. Click
here.
Richard F. Fenno, Jr., "The Political Scientist as Participant Observer," Watching Politicians: Essays on Participant Observation (Berkeley: Institute for Governmental Studies, 1990), pp. 55-94. Click here.
11/15
Ralph Huitt,
"The Outsider in the Senate: An Alternative Role," American
Political Science Review 55 (1961): 566-75. Click
here.
Mary Hawkesworth, “Congressional
Enactments of Race–Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced–Gendered
Institutions,” American Political Science Review
97, 4 (November 2003): 529-550. Click here.
11/20 Unobtrusive Measurement
Babbie, Chapter 11.
Reinharz, Chapter 8.
11/22 Unobtrusive Measurement: The Example of Content Analysis
Lisa D. Brush, "Worthy Widows, Welfare Cheats;
Proper Womanhood in Expert Needs Talk about Single Mothers in the
11/27 Diagnosing Visual Culture: The Case of Picture Theory
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 35-82. Click
here.
11/29
The Visual and the Spatial
Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means," Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, Toni Morrison, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 323-64. Click here.
Edward Soja, “Writing
the City Spatially,” City, 7, 3
(November 2003): 269-80. Click here.
12/4 Examining Discursive Practices: Deconstruction and its Others
Martha S. Feldman, Strategies for Interpreting Qualitative Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), Selections. Click here.
Jennifer Dodge, Sonia M. Ospina, and, Erica
Gabrielle Foldy, “Integrating Rigor and Relevance in Public
Administration Scholarship: The Contribution of Narrative Inquiry,” Public Administration Review 65, 3 (May 2005): 286-300. Click here.
12/6 Deconstruction Redux
Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of
Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of
PART
III: Is Methodological Multivalence Possible and
Desirable?
12/11 Beyond Paradigm: Methodological Pluralism, Beyond Triangulation, and Mixed Methods Research
Evan S. Lieberman, “Nested Analysis as a
Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research,” American Political Science Review, 99, 3 (August 2005): 435-452. Click here.
Reinharz, Chapters 11.
12/13
Summation