PS 100A/200A: Statistical Analysis for Political Science I

 
                               The syllabus is also available in pdf format.

Course Material (Books)

The books listed below are available at the Stanford Bookstore and on reserve at Green.  There is no reader for the course; however, there will be a few articles assigned.  You will need either to download them from  JSTOR   or make copies at the library.

  • Achen, Christoper. 1982. Interpreting and Using Regression. Sage.
  • Bulmer, M.J.  1967. Principles of Statistics. Dover.
  • Fiorina, Morris.  1989. Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment.  Yale University Press.
  • Freedman, David, Robert Pisani and Roger Purves. 1998 (3rd edition).  Statistics.  Norton.
  • King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba.  1994.  Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Researcy.  Princeton University Press. 
 
Course Outline 
(Weeks: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 )
Week 1: Sept. 26
 1. Course Introduction and conceptual overview 
  •   Some useful background to a problem discussed in the lectures is Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa, "Polities and Peace," International Security, Fall 1995. 
 
Week 2: Oct. 1 and 3
 1. Conceptual overview continued, plus examples and exemplars 
  • FPP (Freedman et al.), chaps. 1 and 2.
  • Durkheim, Suicide, Book I, chap. 3, Book II, chaps. 1-3.
  2. cont. 
  • Fiorina, Keystone, chaps. 1-6, and 10.
 
Week 3: Oct. 8 and 10
 1. Describing data: graphs and summary statistics 

 2. cont., plus some math review 

  • FPP, chaps. 3-9.
  • Bulmer, chap. 4.
  • KKV (King, Keohane and Verba), chaps. 1-2.
  • Achen, Christopher. 1977. Measuring Representation: Perils of the Correlation Coefficient. American Journal of Political Science 21, 4 (November), 805-815. Download from JSTOR.
 
Week 4:  Oct. 15 and 17

! 1st problem set due Friday.

 1. Probability: set theory, axioms, and counting 

  • FPP, chaps. 13-15.
  • Bulmer, chaps. 1-2.
 2. continued: conditional probability, Bayes' rule 
 
Week 5: Oct. 22 and 24

1. More probability, random variables, utility theory as an example. 

2. cont., density functions, cdfs, and some probability distributions 

  • Bulmer, chaps. 3, 5, and 6.
  • Handout reading on distributions
 
Week 6: Oct. 29 and Oct. 31

! 2nd problem set due Friday.

   1. The central limit theorem 

  • FPP, chaps. 16-18.
  • Bulmer, chap. 7.
   2. Sampling, surveys, and case selection 
  • FPP, chaps. 19-23.
  • KKV, chap. 4.
 
Week 7: Nov. 5 and 7

1. Hypothesis testing 

  • FPP, chaps. 26-27.
  • Bulmer, chaps. 8-9.
2. continued 
  • FPP, chaps. 28-29.
 
Week 8: Nov. 12 and 14

! 3rd problem set due Friday.

1. Ordinary Least Squares 

2. cont. 

  • FPP, chaps. 10-12.
  • Bulmer, chap. 12.
  • Achen, pages 1-37.
  • KKV, chap. 3.
 
Week 9: Nov. 19 and 21

1. Multivariate regression 

2. cont. 

  • Achen, pages 37-68.
  • KKV, chaps. 4 and 5.
 
Week 10:  Nov. 26 and 28

! 4th problem set due Friday.

1. cont. 

2. Review
 
For problems or questions about course webpages contact Juliana Bambaci or  Junga Kim .
Last updated: September 24, 2001.