261 - 266 of 266 results for: POLISCI

Survey of major topics in the study of Middle Eastern politics including state formation, authoritarian resilience and political Islam

Political economy approaches to key policy outcomes including redistribution, the size of government, fiscal behavior, and pork-barrel politics. Theories related to institutions, interest groups, and geography, focusing on middle- and upper-income countries.

This course surveys the use and empirical evaluation of formal models in political economy to explain policy outcomes, the determinants of political regimes, the sources of institutional persistence, and the causes and consequences of electoral rules. The course has two main goals. The first is to become better consumers and producers of formal work through the study of leading applications in political economy. The second is to introduce innovative approaches to research design and measurement for evaluating formal theories in political economy.

Political scientists increasingly rely on experimental methods. This course covers the principles and logic of experimental design as applied to laboratory, field and survey experiments. We discuss the strengths and limitations of experiments in relation to observational methods. Design considerations include randomization, the construction of treatments, the use of deception, the ethical implications of deception, and new developments in subject recruitment. Turning to the analysis of experimental data, we describe the methods for estimating treatment effects, interactions, and more complex indirect effects stemming from either mediator or moderator variables. We also cover appropriate data analytic strategies for quasi-experimental designs including interrupted time series, matching and propensity scores.