How does one move from a wild idea to a research design? How should we identify relevant variables, move from research question to data analysis, or how to design an identification strategy to assess causal effects. This course introduces you to the practicalities of conducting such research. It will help you understand how these problems arise and how they can be mitigated. When doing so, the seminar focuses on puzzles in political science and international political economy, such as: How can we measure and explain the state’s behaviour in international negotiations? What explains the falling the support for European integration? We focus on the tools that have been developed by political scientists to measure and analyze these phenomena. In doing so, students will be guided and supported by the instructor to design an own study.

Overall, this research design seminar introduces students already familiar with statistics to commonly used statistical analyses in political science. It starts with a refresher on the logic of hypothesis testing and about drawing inferences from a sample to a population. The multilevel modelling framework is introduced, which is often used to model data that is clustered, for instance, in individuals or countries. Finally, the students also become familiar with the problem of causal inference and with survey experiments. By the end of the course, students will have produced a paper using a research question of their choice.

Research-Masterseminar; Open for advanced BA-students

Dunning, Thad. 2012. Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach. Cambridge University Press.

Gelman, Andrew and Hill, Jennifer, 2007. Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press.

Imai, Kosuke. 2017. Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction. Princeton University Press.