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Planning, undertaking and completing a research project - from dissertations to presentations - can be a daunting undertaking for any student, involving a number of easily taken mis-steps for those without adequate guidance. The objective of any research project is to gather data, analyse it based on your research question and present your findings and conclusions. For students, having the right approach to these steps can mean the difference between an easily handled process resulting in a well argued and presented project, or panicked flailing, misdirection and confusion. For those fearful of not getting enough research done, doing it the wrong way, putting it together incorrectly, or unsure of what the end result will be, then Understanding Research is an invaluable guide to getting it right and putting fears to bed. Successfully completing a research project is a major milestone in most university degrees, and it should be daunting - although not unassailable. This book provides students with the guidance necessary to start, undertake and present their research project in social science or the humanities. This text addresses: Where do I start? How do I begin my research and pull it together into a research question? - takes the student through the process of project design, starting research and gaining confidence in their choices Am I Researching the right things? Is it taking me in the direction I want to go? What direction is it taking me in? - explores the decision making process at all points of a research project and the implications of these decisions in the longer term Am I researching in the right way - should I be conducting interviews, reading articles or collecting statistical data? - outlines the practical and philosophical conundrums around specific techniques for gathering and analysing data Focussed explicitly on the needs and exp

The central argument of Japan and the Enemies of Open Political Science is that Eurocentric blindness is not a moral but a scientific failing. In this wide-ranging critique of Western social science, Anglo-American philosophy and French theory, Williams works on the premise that Japan is the most important political system of our time. He explains why social scientists have been so keen to ignore or denigrate Japan's achievements. If social science is to meet the needs of the `Pacific Century', it requires a sustained act of intellectual demolition and subsequent renewal.

Is there an ethnographic turn in political science research and, if so, what does it contribute to the discipline? As this symposium recounts, methodological approaches to political science research have produced notable debates and disputes within the profession. Schwartz-Shea and Majic suggest this may be a \"late methodological moment,\" in any event, an opportune time to take a fresh look at old battles and, more importantly, take the next steps toward building an understanding of ethnographic strategies, clarifying their use, and considering their contributions. Contributions to this forum provide a glimpse into the state of the art and present examples suggestive of the variety and range of studies that have benefited from the use of ethnographic methods. They also indicate that work remains to be done to clarify and better elaborate these tools of the trade, when, and how they are used. Ethnographic research is presented here as a big tent proposition, with the editors leaving it to authors to define the terms on which they use ethnography and to discuss the types of methods they deploy. This definitional looseness (about which I will say more later) is likely to be problematic over the longer-term; but it may be strategic in the short-term, avoiding splintering an already small subset of political science research and opening new possibilities to consideration.

Political science and sociology increasingly rely on mathematical modeling and sophisticated data analysis, and many graduate programs in these fields now require students to take a \"math camp\" or a semester-long or yearlong course to acquire the necessary skills. The problem is that most available textbooks are written for mathematics or economics majors, and fail to convey to students of political science and sociology the reasons for learning often-abstract mathematical concepts. A Mathematics Course for Political and Social Research fills this gap, providing both a primer for math novices and a handy reference for seasoned researchers. The book begins with the fundamental building blocks of mathematics and basic algebra, then goes on to cover essential subjects such as calculus in one and more than one variable, including optimization, constrained optimization, and implicit functions; linear algebra, including Markov chains and eigenvectors; and probability. It describes the intermediate steps most other textbooks leave out, features numerous exercises throughout, and grounds all concepts by illustrating their use and importance in political science and sociology. Uniquely designed for students and researchers in political science and sociology Uses examples from political science and sociology Features \"Why Do I Care?\" sections that explain why concepts are useful to practicing political scientists and sociologists Includes numerous exercises Complete online solutions manual (available only to professors) Selected solutions available online to students

Das Lehrbuch führt in kompakter Form in die Vorgehensweisen empirischer Politikforschung ein.Entlang des Ablaufs empirischer Forschungsprojekte werden die einzelnen Forschungsphasen prägnant und unter Verwendung konkreter Beispiele dargestellt und besprochen.

Political Creativityintervenes in the lively debate currently underway in the social sciences on institutional change. Editors Gerald Berk, Dennis C. Galvan, and Victoria Hattam, along with the contributors to the volume, show how institutions inevitably combine order and change, because formal rules and roles are always available for reconfiguration. Creative action is not the exception but the very process through which all political formations are built, promulgated and changed. Drawing on the rich cache of antidualist theoretical traditions, from poststructuralism and ecological theory to constructivism and pragmatism, a diverse group of scholars probes acts of social innovation in many locations: land boards in Botswana, Russian labor relations, international statistics, global supply chains, Islamic economics in Algeria, Islamic sects and state authority in Senegal, and civil rights reform, colonization, industrial policy, and political consulting in the United States. These political scientists reconceptualizeagencyas a relational process that continually reorders the nature and meaning of people and things,orderas an assemblage that necessitates creative tinkering and interpretation, andchangeas the unruly politics of time that confounds the conventional ordering of past, present, and future.Political Creativityoffers analytical tools for reimagining order and change as entangled processes. Contributors:Stephen Amberg, Chris Ansell, Gerald Berk, Kevin Bruyneel, Dennis C. Galvan, Deborah Harrold, Victoria Hattam, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Gary Herrigel, Joseph Lowndes, Ato Kwamena Onoma, Adam Sheingate, Rudra Sil, Ulrich Voskamp, Volker Wittke.

This groundbreaking and innovative text addresses the deep ontological and epistemological commitments that underpin conventional positivist methods and then demonstrates how \"method\" can be understood in much broader and more interesting ways. Drawing on a broad range of philosophical and methodological theory as well as a wide variety of artistic sources from fine art to cinema and from literature to the blues, leading contemporary thinker Michael Shapiro shows the reader how a more open understanding of the concept of method is rewarding and enlightening. His notion of 'writing-as-method' is enacted throughout the text and offers a stimulating alternative for students to positivist social science methods. This is essential reading for all students and faculty with an interest in post-positivist methods.

Laboratory experiments, survey experiments and field experiments occupy a central and growing place in the discipline of political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science is the first text to provide a comprehensive overview of how experimental research is transforming the field. Some chapters explain and define core concepts in experimental design and analysis. Other chapters provide an intellectual history of the experimental movement. Throughout the book, leading scholars review groundbreaking research and explain, in personal terms, the growing influence of experimental political science. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science provides a collection of insights that can be found nowhere else. Its topics are of interest not just to researchers who are conducting experiments today, but also to researchers who think that experiments can help them make new and important discoveries in political science and beyond.

Debates about the public value of political science have grown more prominent in recent years. Responding to charges of irrelevance and attacks on federal funding for political science research, the American Political Science Association (APSA) and many of its members have intensified efforts to clarify and demonstrate the field's value, especially to elected officials, organized political advocates, and other important decision makers (Lupia 2014; Lupia and Aldrich 2015). This article extends and, to some extent, redirects these efforts by outlining the specific and underappreciated public value of political ethnography. This value, I argue, stems not from political ethnography's capacity to serve important decision makers but rather its ability to foster democratic movements that hold these decision makers accountable to struggles for equality and freedom. Political ethnographic studies exercise this ability through their engagement with two significant and interrelated forms of power, both of which suppress democratic movements and remain largely overlooked in prevailing accounts of the public role of political science. The first form is the calcification of political debates--that is, the tendency of decision makers and other public actors (including social scientists) to reiterate the established terms of these debates, thereby limiting opportunities for democratic movements to voice contentious ideas. For example, in debates about the interests of disadvantaged groups, political advocates and social scientists often reinforce appeals to unity that calcify the presumption of commonality within these groups and, consequently, suppress challenges to intragroup inequalities (Beltrán 2010; Johnson 2007). The second form of power is the naturalization of dominant sociopolitical arrangements or patterns of organization--that is, the tendency of many public actors to take for granted the emergence and perpetuation of dominant arrangements, thereby limiting opportunities for democratic movements to contest them. For example, since the 1970s, several elected officials have advanced neoliberal policies and discourses that naturalize capitalist market arrangements and, in doing so, hinder efforts to challenge the inequalities and domination rooted in these arrangements (Harvey 2005; Schram 2015). Ethnographic studies of political life illuminate different perspectives and shared practices in ways that, I argue, can work to disrupt calcification and naturalization and foster democratic movements. This article situates and elucidates political ethnography's disruptive engagement with power, using examples from across and beyond political science. It concludes by suggesting how political scientists might better promote the disruptive value of political ethnographic research. Doing so, I contend, would productively diversify and enrich existing efforts to clarify and demonstrate the value of the field as a whole.

This pioneering volume is devoted to the analysis of education from the perspective of political science, applying the full range of the discipline's analytical perspectives and methodological tools. The contributions demonstrate how education policy can be explored systematically from a variety of political science perspectives: comparative politics, public policy analysis and public administration, international relations, and political theory. By applying a governance perspective on education policy, the authors explore the changing institutional settings, new actors' constellations, horizontal modes of interaction and public-private regulatory mechanisms with respect to the role of the state in this policy field. The volume deals with questions that are not merely concerned with the content or outcomes of education, but it explicitly takes a political science view on how education politics work. Including country case studies from the Americas and across Europe, institutional analyses of education policy in the EU and the WTO/GATS as well as normative reflections on the topic, the volume provides a grand overview on the diversity of issues in education policy. Dealing with a so far neglected field of policy, this book provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis of a rapidly changing topic. Education in Political Science will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, education, sociology and economics.