PLSC 481MPolitical Analysis Seminar

Catalog

This course introduces students to the principles of the scientific method, emphasizing the construction and evaluation of causal claims, particularly as they relate to the study of politics and public policy. This course will balance three main objectives: 1) learning the theoretical underpinnings of social scientific inquiry, 2) learning the principles of statistical inference, hypothesis testing, and regression analysis, and 3) applying concepts in practice and working with data to conduct empirical tests of causal claims (using R). Students will be introduced to basic techniques for quantitative analysis. Along the way, we will survey different types of research that has been done by political scientists.