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This textbook provides a clear, concise, and comprehensive introduction to methodological issues encountered by the various social science disciplines. It emphasizes applications, with detailed examples, so that readers can put these methods to work in their research. Within a unified framework, John Gerring and Dino Christenson integrate a variety of methods - descriptive and causal, observational and experimental, qualitative and quantitative. The text covers a wide range of topics including research design, data-gathering techniques, statistics, theoretical frameworks, and social science writing. It is designed both for those attempting to make sense of social science, as well as those aiming to conduct original research. The text is accompanied by online practice questions, exercises, examples, and additional resources, including related readings and websites. An essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate programs in communications, criminal justice, economics, business, finance, management, education, environmental policy, international development, law, political science, public health, public policy, social work, sociology, and urban planning.

Scholars of redistricting often discuss "communities of interest" as a guideline for drawing districts, but scholarship offers little guidance on how citizens construe communities and interests in the context of representation. In this article, we seek to better understand how citizens' perceptions of people and places affect preferences regarding representation. Using an original survey conducted in 15 Massachusetts communities, we explore whether citizens have meaningful preferences about the communities with whom they share the same representative. To the extent they do, we test whether these preferences are driven by geographic considerations or other factors such as partisanship, race, and socioeconomic status. Our findings not only offer the opportunity to refine the concept of "communities of interest" to account for voter preferences but also more broadly speak to the literature on the increasingly political nature of residential preferences and their impact on political attitudes, participation, and voting behavior.

Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending's influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an equal or larger payoff than increases in a candidate's viability and find different types of spending are beneficial for frontrunner and long-shot candidates. The results consistently indicate greater early spending works to advantage candidates, suggesting a lack of initial resources is a significant obstacle for candidates who seek to financially benefit from their campaign's performance.

Whether presidential unilateralism is normatively advantageous or parlous for American democracy may depend on the extent to which a check remains on its exercise and abuse. Because the formal institutional constraints on unilateral action are weak, an emerging literature argues that the most important checks on unilateralism may be political, with public opinion playing a pivotal role. However, existing scholarship offers little systematic evidence that public opinion constrains unilateral action. To fill this gap, we use vector autoregression with Granger-causality tests to examine the relationship between presidential approval and executive orders. Contra past speculation that presidents increasingly issue executive orders as a last resort when their stock of political capital is low, we find that rising approval ratings increase the frequency of major unilateral action. Low approval ratings, by contrast, limit the exercise of unilateral power.

While the Supreme Court's legitimacy is generally considered essential to its influence, scholars continue to debate whether the Court's decisions affect individuals' assessments of it. The last week of the 2013 term provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate these issues because the Court made a conservative decision concerning the Voting Rights Act (VRA) only one day before it made a liberal one about same-sex marriage. We use original panel data of individuals' views throughout this period, including a wave collected on the day between the two decisions, to investigate the links among decisions and legitimacy. We find that diffuse support for the Court is sensitive to decisions in these two salient cases conditional on individuals' ideological distance to the Court and their policy support. Moreover, the negative effects of an unfavorable decision are stronger than the positive effects of a favorable one.