Syllabus

 

Time and Location

• M, W:  CSE E119, 4^th period (10:40am – 11:30am)
• F: Lab Session in CSE E231, 4^th period (10:40am – 11:30am)

Course Description

Why do we call our discipline “political science”? What kinds of research do political scientists do, and how do they communicate that knowledge to one another? How do we know what we think we know? How do we measure political phenomena? How would we know if a new public policy “worked”?  How do we analyze data, and what are good data to analyze? Are ethics as hard to define in “political science” as they are in “politics”?

This course aims in providing answers to the above questions, among others, by introducing students to the scientific way of thinking, analyzing, and evaluating political processes. Our discussions, the readings, and the various assignments will facilitate your becoming intelligent consumers of political science research, as well as help you become producers of your own research. The skills that you develop in the course will help you understand the literature that you read in substantive courses, help you distinguish between real research and meaningless rubbish, allow you to identify the benefits and drawbacks of empirical scholarship, enable you to better understand the assumptions behind each research design, introduce you to data management using a popular statistical package, help you find published research and data archives on topics that interest you, and familiarize you with some of the techniques used in individual and aggregate level analysis.

For many students, this will be an entirely different kind of course. Many undergraduate courses require you to become knowledgeable about a field, such as Comparative Politics, Political Behavior, Public Policy, American Politics, or International Relations. In this course, we are not focused on a particular field, but are mostly interested in understanding the methods that political scientists in all fields use to understand and build knowledge. Of course, new things can be both exciting and frightening. Any trepidation that you may have is best overcome by “feeling the fear, and doing it anyway.” The excitement will come with the realization that this knowledge is empowering, in that it will enable you to find, read, and understand research on your own. You will also begin to produce this kind of research, which will give you a product of your own labors.

Course Objectives

This course is intended to provide students with the ability to:

• Critically evaluate the merits and shortcomings of Political Science research;
• Formulate research questions and appropriate research designs;
• Discuss the appropriateness of different research methods;
• Analyze political data.

Course Materials

There are two required texts for this course, available for purchase in the UF Bookstore or from your favorite online retailer. (Note that both textbooks are available to rent from amazon.com in significantly discounted prices, the downside being that you will have to return them by the end of the semester.) We will supplement these texts with scholarly articles (available online) and/or with scanned chapters from other sources (available in e-reserves).

• Johnson, Janet Buttolph, H. T. Reynolds, and Jason D. Mycoff.   Political Science Research Methods (8th Edition).  CQ Press.
• Acock, Alan C. 2014. A Gentle Introduction to Stata (4th Edition). Stata Press.