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Semester 2

Introduction to Political Data Analysis (PLIT08009)

Subject

Politics

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

2

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

**Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This Year 2 course will introduce students to political data analysis using domestic and international data. The course will cover core substantive topics in Politics and international relations, typically exploring one major research question from Politics and one major research question from IR. It will explore how to access relevant data and assess the appropriateness of data. It will provide key skills in quantitative data analysis, including descriptive statistics, cross-tab/contingency tables, measures of association, correlation and regression. These techniques will be used to answer different aspects of the same research question. The course will show how using different types of data and different techniques provide different ways to answer the types of questions typically posed by empirical Politics and IR scholars. Throughout, both the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches will be addressed, as will issues such as validity, reliability and missing data. Lectures will be accompanied by weekly tutorials delivered in a computer lab.

Course Description

**Week 1: Lecture: Understanding data and data quality: Types of data, assessment data quality (validity and reliability), operationalisation, levels of measurement. Hour 2 will include a visit from a representative of the data library to discuss finding your own data; Tutorial: Practice finding data. **Week 2: Research Question: How do we define and measure democracy? Lecture: Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualisation I: Computing descriptive statistics (max, min, mean, median, range, standard deviation), histograms; Tutorial: Introduction to Stata, computing summary statistics and plotting histograms using Stata. **Week 3: Research Question: Are people living in more democratic countries happier?Lecture: Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualisation II: Boxplots, bar-charts, scatterplot, matrix scatterplot; Tutorial: Applications using the Stata chart builder **Week 4: Lecture: The Logic of statistical inference: Populations and samples, types of hypotheses, type I and type II errors, central limit theorem, law of large numbers; Tutorial: Data management, including recoding variables and computing new variables. **Week 5: No Lecture. Innovative Learning Week. **Week 6: Research Question: Does democracy cause peace? Lecture: Comparing two means: T-tests and ANOVA; Tutorial: Running t-tests and ANOVA in Stata and interpretation of the results. **Week 7: Research Question: What are the determinants of voter turnout? Lecture: Measures of association for ordinal and nominal data: Chi square and various PRE measures; Tutorial: Chi-square tests in Stata. **Week 8: Research Question: What determines the popularity of government and their leaders? Lecture: Correlation and bivariate regression; Tutorial: Correlation and bivariate regression in Stata. **Week 9: Research Question: Do attitudes to risk affect referendum preferences for constitutional change? Lecture: Multivariate regression; Tutorial: Multivariate regression in Stata. **Week 10: Research Question: Which theory of voting explains individual vote choice? Stats Material: Logistic regression: Please note: You are NOT required to use logistic regression in your research paper. You should, however, expect to be evaluated on it in your timed assignment; Tutorial: Logistic regression in Stata. **Week 11: Lecture: Extensions of tests learned, preparation for timed assignment; Tutorial: preparation for timed assignment.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a Politics exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one Politics course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second Politics course will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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