Suchergebnisse

With innovative new chapters on process tracing, regression analysis, and natural experiments, the second edition of Rethinking Social Inquiry further extends the reach of this path-breaking book. The original debate with King, Keohane, and Verba_now updated_remains central to the volume, and the new material illuminates evolving discussions of essential methodological tools. Thus, process tracing is often invoked as fundamental to qualitative analysis, but is rarely applied with precision. Pitfalls of regression analysis are sometimes noted, but often are inadequately examined. And the comple

Big data and data science are transforming the world in ways that spawn new concerns for social scientists, such as the impacts of the internet on citizens and the media, the repercussions of smart cities, the possibilities of cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism, the implications of precision medicine, and the consequences of artificial intelligence and automation. Along with these changes in society, powerful new data science methods support research using administrative, internet, textual, and sensor-audio-video data. Burgeoning data and innovative methods facilitate answering previously hard-to-tackle questions about society by offering new ways to form concepts from data, to do descriptive inference, to make causal inferences, and to generate predictions. They also pose challenges as social scientists must grasp the meaning of concepts and predictions generated by convoluted algorithms, weigh the relative value of prediction versus causal inference, and cope with ethical challenges as their methods, such as algorithms for mobilizing voters or determining bail, are adopted by policy makers.

Experimental approaches to political science research have become increasingly prominent in the discipline. Experimental research is regularly featured in some of the discipline's top journals, and indeed in 2014 a new Journal of Experimental Political Science was created, published by Cambridge University Press. At the same time, there are disagreements among political scientists about the limits of experimental research, the ethical challenges associated with this research, and the general model of social scientific inquiry underlying much experimental research. Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences, edited by Dawn Langan Teele (Yale University Press 2015), brings together many interesting perspectives on these issues. And so we have invited a number of political scientists to comment on the book, the issues it raises, and the more general question of "the uses and abuses of experimentation in the social sciences."

Politics, economics, and technology have conspired to make this an exceptionally challenging time for American higher education. Some critics claim that costs are out of control in traditional public and private nonprofit higher education. They believe these institutions will soon go the way of the railroads as for-profit institutions displace them and the Internet replaces college campuses and classrooms. Other critics bemoan the privatization of higher education and the increasing role of market forces. Still others think higher education has lost its way and fails to focus on educating undergraduates.

In A Tale of Two Cultures, Gary Goertz and James Mahoney (2012) seek to describe two distinct social science cultures: "quantitative" and "qualitative." Cultural differences such as these often provide an excuse for groups to retreat to separate sides, to wallow in in-group solidarity, and to prepare for a long and stubborn dispute instead of seeking compromise and agreement. Goertz and Mahoney profess no desire to start a civil war in the social sciences. They are, they tell us, merely anthropologists who have encountered the "Quant" and the "Qual" tribes and who want to catalog their distinctive characteristics. In doing so, they want to make sure that both groups get the respect they deserve for their cultural uniqueness. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Spatial diagrams of politics could and should be iconic for political science in much the same way as supply-and-demand curves are in economics. Many fundamental problems of political science can be connected with them, and many different concepts—such as ideological constraint, cross-pressures, framing, agenda-setting, political competition, voting systems, and party systems, to name just a few—can be illuminated through spatial diagrams. Spatial diagrams raise questions and provide insights. They suggest political maneuvers, possible realignments, and political problems. They provide us with revealing images that aid memory and facilitate analysis. They are a powerful way to think about politics, and we could not do better than to feature them in our textbooks, to use them in our research, and to exhibit them as our brand—as our distinctive way of thinking about how the world works

With its mission broadening and budgets tightening, APSA has continued to operate efficiently and responsibly, and fiscal year 2004 ended within budget and with a growth in net value. In the fall of 2003, the Council made the decision to approve a deficit budget of $43,000. This planned deficit allowed the Association to tap into its reserves to implement an extensive technology plan that included transforming the APSA web site and upgrading the headquarters' aging cabling and network infrastructure. APSA accomplished these projects—and a number of others—and managed to finish the year ahead of budgeted costs, with a deficit of less than $2,000 from programmatic and general operating activities. APSA also ended the year with a significant increase in its net assets.