Publications by Type: Book

2021
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, New Edition
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 2021. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, New Edition. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Publisher's VersionAbstract
"The classic work on qualitative methods in political science"

Designing Social Inquiry presents a unified approach to qualitative and quantitative research in political science, showing how the same logic of inference underlies both. This stimulating book discusses issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and getting the most out of qualitative research. It addresses topics such as interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. The book only uses mathematical notation to clarify concepts, and assumes no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics.

Featuring a new preface by Robert O. Keohane and Gary King, this edition makes an influential work available to new generations of qualitative researchers in the social sciences.
2009
The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives
Gary King, Kay Schlozman, and Norman Nie. 2009. The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives. New York: Routledge Press.
2008
Demographic Forecasting
Federico Girosi and Gary King. 2008. Demographic Forecasting. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Abstract

We introduce a new framework for forecasting age-sex-country-cause-specific mortality rates that incorporates considerably more information, and thus has the potential to forecast much better, than any existing approach. Mortality forecasts are used in a wide variety of academic fields, and for global and national health policy making, medical and pharmaceutical research, and social security and retirement planning.

As it turns out, the tools we developed in pursuit of this goal also have broader statistical implications, in addition to their use for forecasting mortality or other variables with similar statistical properties. First, our methods make it possible to include different explanatory variables in a time series regression for each cross-section, while still borrowing strength from one regression to improve the estimation of all. Second, we show that many existing Bayesian (hierarchical and spatial) models with explanatory variables use prior densities that incorrectly formalize prior knowledge. Many demographers and public health researchers have fortuitously avoided this problem so prevalent in other fields by using prior knowledge only as an ex post check on empirical results, but this approach excludes considerable information from their models. We show how to incorporate this demographic knowledge into a model in a statistically appropriate way. Finally, we develop a set of tools useful for developing models with Bayesian priors in the presence of partial prior ignorance. This approach also provides many of the attractive features claimed by the empirical Bayes approach, but fully within the standard Bayesian theory of inference.

2004
Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies
Gary King, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, Gary King, Ori Rosen, and Martin A Tanner. 2004. Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies brings together a diverse group of scholars to survey the latest strategies for solving ecological inference problems in various fields. The last half decade has witnessed an explosion of research in ecological inference – the attempt to infer individual behavior from aggregate data. The uncertainties and the information lost in aggregation make ecological inference one of the most difficult areas of statistical inference, but such inferences are required in many academic fields, as well as by legislatures and the courts in redistricting, by businesses in marketing research, and by governments in policy analysis.
Complete Book
1994
Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Designing Social Inquiry presents a unified approach to qualitative and quantitative research in political science, showing how the same logic of inference underlies both. This stimulating book discusses issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and the uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and getting the most out of qualitative research. It addresses topics such as interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. The book only uses mathematical notation to clarify concepts, and assumes no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics.

See the 2021 edition.

KKV, the cake version. (Cooked up by Sherry Zaks, UC-Davis Ph.D. Candidate) More of the cake!
1989
The Presidency in American Politics
Paul Brace, Christine Harrington, and Gary King. 1989. The Presidency in American Politics. New York and London: New York University Press.
1988
The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in the Presidency
Gary King and Lyn Ragsdale. 1988. The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in the Presidency. Washington, D.C: Congressional Quarterly Press. Publisher's Version