Political Science 599: Intro to Empirical Methods in Political Analysis

Fall 2017
TuTh 4-5:30 (7603 HH)
Professor: Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Office: 7735 Haven Hall; email wmebane@umich.edu
Office hours: Tue 1-3 or other times by appointment.
Lab: Thu 12-1 (7603 HH)
GSI: Kirill Zhirkov
Office: 7750 Haven Hall ; email kzhirkov@umich.edu
Office hours: Tue and Thu 1-2 or other times by appointment.


Course web page: in CTools; syllabus also at http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/ps599.html

Assignment Due Dates
due date description weight
TBA several problem sets 85%
-- participation 15%

I expect problem sets will be due Sept 19, Oct 3, Oct 19, Nov 7, Nov 21, Nov 30, Dec 12 and Dec 19.

Reading Availability

I've requested that most of the books that are cited as reading sources be placed on 4-hour reserve. Some of the snippets from some of the books are posted on the course Canvass site.

Class meeting and reading schedule

  1. count data, conditional association and Simpson's paradox (Sep 7)

  2. measurement, summary statistics: plots, moments and quantiles (Sep 12-14)

    Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Jonathan Wall. 2015. ``Election Frauds, Postelection Legal Challenges and Geography in Mexico.'' Presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, September 3-6, 2015. http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/apsa15.pdf

    Richard A. Becker, William S. Cleveland and Ming-Jen Shyu. 1996. ``The Visual Design and Control of Trellis Display.'' Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 5(2, June): 123-155.

    Deepayan Sarkar. ``Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R - Figures and Code.'' http://lmdvr.r-forge.r-project.org/

  3. probability, distributions, sampling (Sep 19-21)

    Casella, George, and Roger L. Berger. 2002. Statistical Inference. 2d ed. Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning. Chapters 1-5.

    Will H. Moore and David A. Siegel. 2013. A Mathematics Course for Political & Social Research. Princeton. Chapters 10-11.

    Thomas Lumley. 2010. Complex Surveys: A Guide to Analysis Using R. Wiley.

  4. parameters and estimation (least squares, moments, ML, Bayes) (Sep 26-Oct 5)

  5. regression (Oct 10-19)

    Will H. Moore and David A. Siegel. 2013. A Mathematics Course for Political & Social Research. Chapters 12-13.

  6. regression estimation (least squares, ML, MCMC) (Oct 24-31)

    Will H. Moore and David A. Siegel. 2013. A Mathematics Course for Political & Social Research. Chapter 15.

  7. hypothesis tests and confidence intervals, posterior distributions (Nov 2-14)

    James O. Berger and Thomas Sellke. 1987. ``Testing a Point Null Hypothesis: TheIrreconcilability of P Values and Evidence.'' Journal of the American Statistical Association 82 (1): 112-122.

    James O. Berger. 2003. ``Could Fisher, Jeffreys and Neyman Have Agreed on Testing?'' Statistical Science 18 (1): 1-12.

    James O. Berger. 2003. ``Understanding P-values'' (especially try the Java applet). http://www.stat.duke.edu/~berger/p-values.html

    Casella, George, and Roger L. Berger. 2002. Statistical Inference. 2d ed. Chapter 8.

    Efron, Bradley. 2010. Large-scale Inference: Empirical Bayes Methods for Estimation, Testing and Prediction. Cambridge.

  8. trends and spurious regressions, dynamics and autocorrelation (Nov 16)

  9. contingency tables and regression with categorical outcomes (Nov 21-30)

  10. theories and causality (Dec 5-7 (or 12))

    Judea Pearl. 2017. ``The Eight Pillars of Causal Wisdom,'' An edited transcript of a lecture given at the West Coast Experiments, April 2017 video posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHVUFqI0zk

    Judea Pearl. 2009. Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2d ed. Cambridge.

    Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. 2009. Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Princeton.

    Dunning, Thad. 2012. Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach (Strategies for Social Inquiry). Cambridge.

    Gerber, Alan S., and Donald P. Green. 2012. Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. Norton.

    Andrew Gelman, John B. Carlin, Hal S. Stern and Donald B. Rubin. 2004. Bayesian Data Analysis, 2d ed. Sections 15.1-15.4.

    William H. Greene. 2012. Econometric Analysis, 7th Ed. Section 16.8.

  11. outliers and rank statistics (Dec 12)

  12. latent variables and dimension reduction (Dec 12)

    Will H. Moore and David A. Siegel. 2013. A Mathematics Course for Political & Social Research. Chapter 14.

Following are a few other books you may wish to consult. Many other books may also be helpful. Too many to name! And articles.

Jeff Gill. 2006. Essential Mathematics for Political and Social Research. Cambridge.

Jeff Gill. 2007. Bayesian Methods: A Social and Behavioral Approach. 2d ed. Chapman & Hall.

Simon Jackman. 2009. Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. Wiley.

Jeffrey M. Woolridge. 2002. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data. MIT.



Walter Mebane 2017-09-07