West Virginia University
Department of Political Science
Fall 2005
Political Science 600
Introduction to Political Research
TR 10:00-11:15 in WDB-D 306E
Thomas Scotto
E-mail: tscotto@mix.wvu.edu
Phone: 304-293-3811 ext. 5297
Office: 301C Woodburn
Office Hours: Tues. & Thursday
1:30PM-2:15PM
Introduction to Political Research
Political Science 600 is the foundation course in research methods for WVU’s graduate program in political science.
The objective is to give you an understanding of the language, logic, and scope of the field of political science. I
focus on both descriptive and causal inferences and the multiple methodological approaches (inductive, deductive,
case studies, etc.) that political scientists utilize to study topics of interest. My goal is not to convince you that one
methodological approach is superior to another. Indeed, my aim is to convince you that multiple approaches are
often the best way to attack a problem.
A large portion of the course will entail the discussion and evaluations of causal inferences and how one should go
about evaluating the validity of such conjectures. I plan on aiming much of the class discussions at the interests of
those in the class. The major goal for the course is to have you create a credible research question and design that
you will present to the faculty in December. Although many believe that 600 is a statistics and mathematics based
course, the emphasis will be on the philosophy of research in the social sciences.
Grading:
Participation (25 percent): This course will not work if you do not take the time to carefully read the assigned
work. The format of the class will be discussion rather than lecture. Often, I will try to place the readings in
context using your own research ideas. Sometimes, the course might involve a rigorous critique of these ideas.
Please do not be alarmed; it will be done with the aim of making you a better scholar and never should be taken as a
personal attack!
Optimally, all reading should be completed before class. We’re all human, and all of us have bad weeks.
Consequently, I understand if you occasionally miss a reading. However, keep in mind that the quality of the
course will be a function of the time commitment you give to it. Further, since this is a “core” methods course,
failure to learn the material will likely put you at a disadvantage in other courses and during the thesis or
dissertation proposal process. If I sense a lack of commitment on your part, I will talk to you.
Paper/ Research Design (50 percent):
This is designed to be the first stage of a full scale project that you might want to implement later in the course of
your graduate career. Your task this semester is to identify a problem of interest, write a literature review, and come
up with a design statement. Do not go past the design statement and actually run data analysis or implement the
project! With this project you want to a) ask a significant but answerable question that could potentially serve as a
course paper in the spring, and b) start as soon as possible to get a good handle on the literature. You should feel
free to consult with me!
The question asked must take an empirical, cause and effect form. The question you ask should be about either
politics or policy. To help with the format and style of your paper, you might want to look through recent issues of
The American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, International Studies Quarterly, etc.
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Here is a suggested outline:
I.
II.
III.
Introduction (no more than 1 page): tell the reader about the research question to be asked and its
significance
Literature review (3 to 5 pages): place your question in the context of what is already known about the
subject. Explain to the reader the area where more work needs to be done, and how your research will
“make a contribution.”
Design statement (4-7 pages): a detailed discussion of how you will go about answering your question.
Be sure to define the concepts and inform the reader as to how they will be measured (i.e. will you
measure a country’s income using the World Bank’s computation of a country’s per capita GDP?).
Define your hypothesis, discuss the methodological techniques you wish to apply, and inform the reader
about the decision rules to be applied in drawing your inference. You also want to consider how rival
hypotheses will be countered.
Short assignments (25 percent): Brief written homework assignments will be given about once every two weeks.
They will be designed to rattle your mind on key topics raised in class. All students will have the opportunity to
rewrite homework that does not successfully master the aim of the assignment.
Students with Disabilities:
If you are a person with a disability and anticipate needing any type of accommodation in order to participate in this
class, please advise me and make appropriate arrangements with Disability Services (293-6700).
Schedule of Readings and Lectures:
Tuesday, August 23rd: Introduction
Thursday, August 25th: Political Science as an Academic Discipline
Required Readings: Katznelson, Ira and Helen V. Milner. 2002. “American political science: The
discipline’s state and the state of the discipline.” In Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds. Political
science: The state of the discipline. New York: W.W. Norton. (copy available in department office)
Almond, Gabriel A. 1988. “Separate tables: Schools and sects in political science.” PS: Political science
and politics. 21, no. 4: 828-842.
Grant, J. Tobin. 2005. “What divides us? The image and organization of political science.” PS: Political
science and politics 38, no. 3: 379-386
Tuesday, August 30th: Library Skills Session, Location TBA
Thursday, September 1st: Examining a Multi-Method Approach to a Phenomena of Interest
Required Reading: Goemans, H.E. 2000. War and Punishment: the causes of war termination and the First
World War. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Tuesday, September 6th: The Difficulty of Social Science: What Makes What we do so Frustrating!
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 1.
Kuran, Timur. 1991. “Now out of never: The element of surprise in the East European Revolution of
1989.” World politics 44, no. 1: 7-48.
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Thursday, September 8th: Descriptive Inference and an Introduction to the Comparative Method
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 2, pp 34-46.
Mill, John Stewart. 1843. “Of the four methods of experimental inquiry,” In J.S. Mill, A system of logic:
ratiocinative and inductive. Book 3, Chapter 2 (e-reserve)
Przeworski, Adam and Henry Teune. 1970. The logic of comparative social inquiry. New York: Wiley.
(Introduction and Chapter 2 on e-reserve)
Tuesday, September 13th: Comparative Method and Comparative History
Required Readings: Lijphart, Arend. 1971. “Comparative politics and the comparative method” American
political science review 65, no. 3: 682-693
Lijphardt, Arend. 1975. “The comparable cases strategy in comparative research.” Comparative political
studies 8, no. 2(?): 158-177. (On E-Reserve)
Is Mill’s Comparative Method Outdated?
Lieberson, Stanley. 1991. “Small N’s and big conclusions: An examination of the reasoning in comparative
studies based on a small number of cases.” Social forces 70, no. 2: 307-320.
Savolaninen, Jukka. 1994. “The rationality of drawing big conclusions based on small samples: In defense
of Mill’s methods.” Social forces 72, no. 4: 1217-1224.
Lieberson, Stanley. 1994. “More on the uneasy case for using Mill-type methods in small-N comparative
studies” Social forces 72, no. 4: 1225-1236.
Thursday, September 15th: Descriptive Inference, History, and Political Science
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 2, pp 46-74.
Lustick, Ian S. 1996. “History, historiography, and political science: Multiple historical records and the
problem of selection bias.” American political science review 90, no. 3: 605-618.
Tuesday, September 20th: Making a Historical Event into More: The Analytic Narrative
Required Readings: Bates, Robert, et al. 1998. Analytic Narratives. New Jersey: Princeton University
Press. Introduction, Chapters 4, 5 and Conclusion: pp. 3-22 and 148-239.
Skocpol, Theda, and Margaret Somers. 1980. “The uses of history in macrosocial inquiry.” Comparative
studies in society and history. 22, no. 2: 174-197.
Buthe, Tim. 2002. “Taking temporality seriously: Modeling history and the use of narratives as evidence.”
American political science review 96, no. 3: 481-494.
Thursday, September 22nd: The Science in Everyday Human Behavior: “Deducing?” Causal Mechanisms
Required Readings: Elster, Jon. 1989. Nuts and bolts for the social sciences. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
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Tuesday, September 27th: On Causality….
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 3, pp 75-98.
Dessler, David. 1991. “Beyond correlations: Toward a causal theory of war.” International studies
quarterly 35, no. 3: 337-355.
McKeown, Timothy. 2004. “Case studies and the limits of the quantitative worldview.” In Henry E. Brady,
and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Thursday, September 29th: More on Causality and Causal Mechanisms
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 3, pp 99-144.
Tilly, Charles. 2001. “Mechanisms in political processes.” Annual review of political science 4, no. 1: 2141.
Paul, David. 1985. “Clio and the economics of QWERTY.” American economic review 75, no. 2: 332-337.
(Note: This story might be a fable)
Tuesday, October 4th: Case Selection
Required Readings: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 4, pp 115149.
Geddes, Barbara. 1990. “How the cases you choose affect the answers you get: Selection bias in
comparative politics.” Political analysis 2: 131-152. (On e-reserve)
Collier, David, James Mahoney, and Jason Seawright. 2004. “Claiming too much: Warnings about
selection bias.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared
standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Thursday, October 6th: Pitfalls that kill Qualitative and Quantitative Designs
Required Reading: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 4, pp 150207.
Tuesday, October 11th: Measurement
Required Readings: Stevens, S.S. 1946. “On the theory of scales of measurement.” Science 103, no. 2684:
677-680.
Blalock, Hubert M, Jr. 1979. Social statistics, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 11-24 (on Reserve).
Brady, Henry E. 2004. “Doing good and doing better: How far does the quantitative template get us?” In
Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Thursday, October 13th: Validity
Required Readings: Cook, Thomas D., and Donald T. Campbell. 1979. Quasi-experimentation: Design
and analysis for field settings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chapter 2 (on Reserve)
Tuesday, October 18th:
Making the most of your data
Required Reading: King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry:
scientific inference in qualitative research. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Chapter 6, pp. 208230.
Collier, David, Henry Brady, and Jason Seawright. 2004. “Sources of leverage in causal inference: Toward
an alternative view of methodology.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry:
Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Thursday, October 20th: Units of Analysis, Case Selection, and Ecological Fallacies
Required Reading: Robinson, W.S. 1950. “Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals.”
American sociological review. 15, no. 3: 351-357.
Munck, Gerardo L. 2002. “Tools for qualitative research.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds.
Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ragin, Charles C. 2002. “Turning the tables: How case oriented research challenges variable-oriented
research.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared
standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Tuesday, October 25th: KKV Critiqued
Required Reading: Multiple authors. 1995. “Review symposium: The qualitative-quantitative disputation:
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba's Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in
qualitative research.” American Political Science Review 89, no. 2: 454-481.
Brady, Henry E., David Collier, and Jason Seawright. 2002. “Refocusing the discussion of
methodology.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools,
shared standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Brady, Henry E., David Collier, and Jason Seawright. 2002. “The quest for standards: King,
Keohane, and Verba’s Designing social inquiry.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds.
Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Thursday, October 27th: Continued Critique of KKV:
Required Readings: Bartels, Larry M. 2004. “Some unfulfilled promises of quantitative imperialism.”
In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Rogowski, Ronald. 2004. “How inference in the social (but not the physical) sciences neglects theoretical
anomaly.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared
standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2004. “Bridging the quantitative-qualitative divide.” In Henry E. Brady, and David Collier,
eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 2004. “The importance of research design.” In Henry
E. Brady, and David Collier, eds. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse tools, shared standards. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Tuesday, November 1st: Quasi Experiments
Required Reading: Cook, Thomas D., and Donald T. Campbell. 1979. Quasi-experimentation: Design and
analysis for field settings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chapter 3 (on Reserve)
Thursday, November 3rd: No Class
Tuesday, November 8th: Introduction to Quantitative Methodology (1)
Required Reading: Berry, William D. and Mitchell S. Sanders. Understanding multivariate research: A
primer for beginning social scientists. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 1-39
Thursday, November 10th: Introduction to Quantitative Methodology (2)
Required Reading: Berry, William D. and Mitchell S. Sanders. Understanding multivariate research: A
primer for beginning social scientists. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. pp. 41-80
Tuesday, November 15th: Method v. Theory Driven Social Science: Politicizing Science?
Required Readings: Norton, Anne. 2004. “Political science as a vocation.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M.
Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 67-82.
Piven, Francis Fox. 2004. “The politics of policy science.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E.
Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp.
83-105.
Reed, Adolph, Jr. 2004. “The study of black politics and the practice of black politics: Their historical
relation and evolution.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problem and methods
in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 83-105.
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Thursday, November 17th: Method v. Theory Driven Social Science: Rational Choice Again on Fire!
Cox, Gary W. 2004. “Lies, damned lies, and rational choice analysis.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith,
and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 167-185.
Ryan, Alan. 2004. “Problems and methods in political science: rational explanation and its limits.” In Ian
Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New
York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 186-200.
Levi, Margaret. 2004. “An analytic narrative approach to puzzles and problems.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M.
Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 201-226.
Bueno De Mesquita, Bruce. 2004. “The methodological study of politics.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith,
and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 227-247.
Tuesday, November 22nd: No Class: Thanksgiving Week
Thursday, November 24th: No Class: Thanksgiving Week
Tuesday, November 29th: Multi-Method?
Required Readings: Sil, Rudra. 2004. “Problems chasing methods or methods chasing problems? Research
communities, constrained pluralism, and the role of eclecticism.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and
Tarek E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge University
Press. pp. 307-331.
Connolly, William E. 2004. “Method, problem, faith.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E.
Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp.
332-349.
Ellis, Elizabeth. 2004. “Provincialism in the study of politics.” In Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek
E. Masoud, eds. Problems and methods in the study of politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
pp. 350-376.
Thursday, December 1st: Primer on Data Management with STATA
Tuesday, December 6th: Primer on Data Management with STATA
Thursday, December 8th: Individual Research Consultations
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