This course will teach you to answer the question “Does X actually cause Y or are they merely correlated?” We will begin by looking at randomized experiments including:
• a survey experiment testing how a hypothetical candidate’s ethnicity, age, and religion affects their popularity with voters
• a field experiment that randomly assigns female police officers to districts without any
• an evaluation of programs aimed at discouraging former rebels from joining criminal gangs
We will also discuss the ethics, practicalities, and limitations of experiments—and design our own. The course then turns to “natural experiments” and “quasi-experiments” such as:
• the impact of a new policy that is being gradually phased in (e.g., comparing districts where the policy has already been implemented to those where it has not)
• the legacy of colonialism on democratic values (e.g., comparing villages falling on one side of an arbitrary colonial border to those on the other)
• how a monarch’s gender impact’s foreign policy (e.g., comparing European monarchs who, by chance, had no sons and were thus succeed by a queen instead of a king)
These natural and quasi-experiments—which tend to be partially but not completely random—require more advanced statistical tools. Therefore, we will learn R, a programming language that has become the standard among the newest generation of political scientists.
• a survey experiment testing how a hypothetical candidate’s ethnicity, age, and religion affects their popularity with voters
• a field experiment that randomly assigns female police officers to districts without any
• an evaluation of programs aimed at discouraging former rebels from joining criminal gangs
We will also discuss the ethics, practicalities, and limitations of experiments—and design our own. The course then turns to “natural experiments” and “quasi-experiments” such as:
• the impact of a new policy that is being gradually phased in (e.g., comparing districts where the policy has already been implemented to those where it has not)
• the legacy of colonialism on democratic values (e.g., comparing villages falling on one side of an arbitrary colonial border to those on the other)
• how a monarch’s gender impact’s foreign policy (e.g., comparing European monarchs who, by chance, had no sons and were thus succeed by a queen instead of a king)
These natural and quasi-experiments—which tend to be partially but not completely random—require more advanced statistical tools. Therefore, we will learn R, a programming language that has become the standard among the newest generation of political scientists.
- Teacher: Matthew D Simonson