Weekly Writing Assignments and Resources
Political Science 501, Fall 2003
Prof. Frank R. Baumgartner

Weekly writing assignments and discussion topics

• Week 2, Scientific Approach.
• Week 3, Measurement Issues. Click here to see a copy of a report from the 1917 Cost of Living Study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, used to calculate the Cost of Living Index.
• Week 4, Sampling and other data collection issues. Click here to see a useful spreadsheet showing examples of sampling errors based on different sample sizes, variances, and standard deviations.
• Week 5, Campbell and Stanley: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Research Designs. Click here to see another cool spreadsheet with examples of regression toward the mean with different amounts of measurement error from test to test.
• Week 6, Quasi-experiments in the literature.
• Week 7, Experiments. Click here to see the results from Iyengar's whack-a-pol study.
• Week 8, Game Theory.
• Week 9, Linking formal models and empirical tests.
• Week 10, Cross-level inference and the "ecological fallacy." Note that we will also spend time in class reviewing your term paper projects. Come to class with questions about your projects.
• Week 11, The Macro Polity.
• Week 12, Putnam, Making Democracy Work.
• Week 13, Bennett and Stam, The Behvioral Study of War.
• Week 14, Various authors, Controversies and paradigms.

Links to useful places and to some of the readings:

• JSTOR (You can get articles from APSR, JOP, AJPS, and other major journals here for free. You'll need this for all your classes.)

• The NES Codebook (Read the section on sampling carefully for our September 24 class meeting.)

• The Lobbying and Public Advocacy Project (Read the section on sampling in the grant proposals, the questionnaire protocol, and other information in the documentation section of the web site for our September 24 class meeting.)

• Whack-a-Pol (Play this game and think about what the results might be like for our October 15 class meeting.)

• Experimental Designs for Political Communication Research: From Shopping Malls to the Internet. (Paper presented at the Workshop in Experimental Methods, Harvard University, May 5-6, 2000. by Shanto Iyengar, for our October 9 class meeting.)

• The NSF EITM Report (Reading for last class meeting.)

Watch this space for additional resources and assignments throughout the term.