Political Analysis

"Pollock and Edwards explain the nuts-and-bolts of research design and data analysis in a clear and concise style. The Essential of Political Analysis is an intuitive introduction to complex material, replete with examples from the political science literature that add relevance to statistical concepts. This text offers students an excellent balance between the technical and the practical." —Francis Neely, San Francisco State University Gain the skills you need to conduct political analysis and critically assess statistical research. In this Sixth Edition of The Essentials of Political Science, bestselling authors Philip H. Pollock III and Barry C. Edwards build students’ analytic abilities and develop their statistical reasoning with new data, fresh exercises, and accessible examples. This brief, accessible guide walks students through the essentials—measuring concepts, formulating and testing hypotheses, describing variables—while using key terms, chapter-opening objectives, over 80 tables and figures, and practical exercises to get them using and applying their new skills. Using SPSS, STATA or R? Discounted package deals available with Philip H. Pollock’s companion workbooks. . Give your students the SAGE edge! SAGE edge offers a robust online environment featuring an impressive array of free tools and resources for review, study, and further exploration, keeping both instructors and students on the cutting edge of teaching and learning.

Most of economics takes politics for granted. Through some (often implausible) assumptions, it seeks to explain away political structures by characterizing them as stable and predictable or as inconsequential in understanding what goes on in an economy. Such attempts are misguided, and this book shows how governments and political institutions are composed of people who respond to incentives and whose behavior and choices can be studied through the lens of economics. This book aims to bridge the gap between economics and politics, and in doing so hopes to instill in the reader a deeper appreciation for social scientific thinking. Opening with a refresher on microeconomics and an introduction to the toolkit of political economy, it ensures that the necessary building blocks are in place before building up from the level of the individual and the firm to show how a political–economic equilibrium can be achieved. The text explores how to separate primitives—the external parts of a model that we cannot affect—from outcomes—the internal parts of a model that we can. Moreover, it demonstrates that economic and political issues alike can be studied within the same general framework of analysis. Political Economy and Policy Analysis offers readers the chance to gain a more sophisticated understanding of political processes, economic processes, and the interplay among them. Adopting an applied microeconomics approach, it will be ideal for upper-level undergraduate or postgraduate courses on political economy, public choice, or policy analysis. A complementary workbook with exercises and solutions that accompanies Political Economy and Policy Analysis is available for download under the eResources tab at: https://www.routledge.com/Political-Economy-and-Policy-Analysis/Merlo/p/book/9781138591783.

In this provocative work, Martin Shapiro proposes an original model for the study of courts, one that emphasizes the different modes of decision making and the multiple political roles that characterize the functioning of courts in different political systems.

Statistics are just as vital to understanding political science as the study of institutions, but getting students to understand them when teaching a methods course can be a big challenge. Statistics for Political Analysis makes understanding the numbers easy. The only introduction to statistics book written specifically for political science undergraduates, this book explains each statistical concept in plain language—from basic univariate statistics and the basic measures of association to bivariate and multivariate regression—and uses real world political examples. Students learn the relevance of statistics to political science, how to understand and calculate statistics mathematically, and how to obtain them using SPSS. All calculations are modeled step-by-step, giving students needed practice to master the process without making it intimidating. Each chapter concludes with exercises that get students actively applying the steps and building their professional skills through data calculation, analysis, and memo writing.

Political Analysis provides an accessible and engaging yet original introduction and distinctive contribution, to the analysis of political structures, institutions, ideas and behaviours, and above all, to the political processes through which they are constantly made and remade. Following an innovative introduction to the main approaches and concepts in political analysis, the text focuses thematically on the key issues which currently concern and divide political analysts, including the boundaries of the political; the question of structure, agency and power; the dynamics of political change; the relative significance of ideas and material factors; and the challenge posed by postmodernism which the author argues the discipline can strengthen itself by addressing without allowing it to become a recipe for paralysis.

This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly. It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well. By the end of the first seven chapters, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. The remaining four chapters will begin to introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available such as how to use contributed libraries or write programs in R. The book details how to perform nearly every task routinely associated with statistical modeling: descriptive statistics, basic inferences, estimating common models, and conducting regression diagnostics. For the intermediate or advanced reader, the book aims to open up the wide array of sophisticated methods options that R makes freely available. It illustrates how user-created libraries can be installed and used in real data analysis, focusing on a handful of libraries that have been particularly prominent in political science. The last two chapters illustrate how the user can conduct linear algebra in R and create simple programs. A key point in these chapters will be that such actions are substantially easier in R than in many other programs, so advanced techniques are more accessible in R, which will appeal to scholars and policy researchers who already conduct extensive data analysis. Additionally, the book should draw the attention of students and teachers of quantitative methods in the political disciplines.

Empirical Political Analysis introduces students to the full range of qualitative and quantitative methods used in political science research. Organized around all of the stages of the research process, this comprehensive text surveys designing experiments, conducting research, evaluating results, and presenting findings. With exercises in the text and in a companion lab manual, Empirical Political Analysis gives students applied insights on the scopes and methods of political science research. Features: Offers comprehensive coverage of quantitative and qualitative research methods in political science, a hallmark since it first published over 25 years ago. Covers the research process from start to finish—hypothesis formation, literature review, research design, data gathering, data analysis, and research report writing. Includes in-depth examples of political science research to give discipline-specific instruction on political analysis. Features a “Practical Research Ethics” box in every chapter to make students aware of common ethical dilemmas and potential solutions to them. Written by political scientists who actively publish in subfields ranging from comparative politics to environmental policy to political communications to voting behavior. Includes learning goals, key terms, and research examples to help students engage and explore the most important concepts.