Teaching | Gary King

Designing Political Inquiry, Government 1003 (for undergrads)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Not offered this year.

Class Materials:

Syllabus for Designing Political Research, G1003

This class is for students who wish to learn how to conduct, and evaluate, modern social science research. For students planning to write senior theses; considering graduate school; who would like to understand the concept of ``evidence'' for law school; or thinking about taking a job with a consulting firm, research is almost the only skill you need to learn. The goal will be to assess the state of a scholarly literature, identify the interesting questions, formulate strategies for answering them, acquire the methodological tools with which to conduct the research, and understand how to write up the results so they can be published.

Although most undergraduate, and even most graduate courses, address these issues indirectly, we provide an explicit analysis of each. We do this in the context of a variety of strategies of empirical political inquiry. Our examples cover American politics, international relations, comparative politics, and other subfields of political science and social science that rely on empirical evidence. We do not address certain research in political theory for which empirical evidence is not central, but our methodological emphases will be as varied as our substantive examples. We take empirical evidence to be historical, quantitative, or anthropological. Specific methodologies include survey research, experiments, non-experiments, intensive interviews, statistical analyses, case studies, and participant observation.

Gov 2020: The Hidden Curriculum

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Semester: Fall

Year offered: 2025

- Syllabus
- Consolidated View of entire class, or direct links:

- For Instructors (preview for students): Classes, Lectures, Sections
- For Students: Assignments, Canvas

Summary: Gov 2020 has two components:

A popular semester-long project where students learn how to write and publish an article in a scholarly journal, beginning with an article replication. This assignment, an early version of which was described in the article "Publication, Publication" and previously part of Gov 2001*, has resulted in many students' first publications, conference presentations, dissertations, and awards.
A collection of projects designed to show how science (and, by extension, the profession) works. It includes what a big idea is in our field; developing defensible answers; co-authoring; writing for impact; effective presentations; solving problems by changing the question; going beyond publication to impact; managing the transition academics undergo from private to public figure; leveraging universities, startups, industry, and government for research; and more.

A considerable body of wisdom about how to succeed in our profession accumulates informally as each PhD cohort learns, improves, and passes knowledge on to its successors. Most of this "hidden curriculum" is not taught in formal classes, but is essential to making the most of graduate school, producing high quality research, and securing the best jobs. Unfortunately, the 2020 pandemic severed the connection between cohorts, leaving individual students to try to piece together this knowledge on their own. We formalize much of this informal wisdom to provide 20/20 vision (remember the course number yet?) into the hidden curriculum and go well beyond what had been possible even before the pandemic, and increase the chances of success in graduate school and the profession.

The biggest impact methodologists make when asked for advice is rarely the answers to technical questions. Instead, it is providing the big picture and reorienting research directions. Many often pose what they think is a technical question (and sometimes sounds like "Someone told me I have a problem called `endogeneity'. Where is the button in SPSS to fix it?"), but which has no answer, isn't even a coherent question, or doesn't matter even if it could be answered. When we get them to tell us about their project, we may learn that they have unsolvable problems (such as impossible identification issues, 85% missing data, theory and data with little correspondence, or research questions that no one would care about even if they could be answered, etc.). When successful, we work out the bigger picture with them and reframe the research question into one that other scholars would care about and which can be answered without impossible-to-defend technical assumptions. Completion, fencing with anonymous reviewers, and publication become far easier too. This is by far the most common impact good methodologists have on those around them. There's no time to teach this in technical methods classes, but you will learn it in Gov 2020.

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* This assignment was previously part of Gov2001. (A new version of Gov 2001, excluding this replication exercise, is now offered by others.) Materials from when I taught Gov 2001 remain available, including my online class lectures; the book Unifying Political Methodology; an app 2k1-in-silico: An Interactive Methods Non-Textbook and related paper Statistical Intuition Without Coding (or Teachers); Perusall.com, and the course website.

Introduction to Quantitative Political Methodology, G1000

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Year offered: 2010

Not offered by me this year. Introduction to major quantitative technqiues used in political science. Covers exploratory data analysis, as well as descriptive and causal statistical inference of many types. The course emphasizes probability theory, regression analysis and other statistical techniques, and uses new techniques of stochastic simulation to get answers easily and to interpret statistical results in a manner very close to the political substance of the problem at hand. NOTE: Frequently taken by undergraduates needing quantitative techniques for thesis research and by graduate students satisfying department requirements. This course also serves as the first in a series of three quantitative courses offered by the department.

Math Prefresher for Political Scientists (Faculty advisor)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Year offered: 2023

Not only do the quantitative and formal modeling courses at Harvard require mathematics and computer programming | it's becoming increasingly difficult to take courses in political economy, American politics, comparative politics, or international relations without encountering game-theoretic models or statistical analyses. One need only flip through the latest issues of the top political science journals to see that mathematics have entered the mainstream of political science. Unfortunately, most undergraduate political science programs have not kept up with this trend, and first-year graduate students often find themselves lacking in basic technical skills. This course is not intended to be an introduction to game theory or quantitative methods. Rather, it introduces basic mathematics and computer skills needed for quantitative and formal modeling courses offered at Harvard. No tests are administered or grades are given out, but almost all incoming graduate students in Government take the course. The course is offered every year in the two weeks before classes start. See the Math Prefresher Web Site.

Quantitative Social Science Methods, I: Government 2001, and E-200

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Semester: Fall

Year offered: 2022

Gov2001 is the first (or sometimes second) course for incoming Harvard Government Department PhD students; also taken by graduate and undergraduate students in other departments, and students elsewhere through the Harvard Extension School as Stat E-200. For details, see the class website: j.mp/G2001, where you can also access all the lecture videos via YouTube or, with collaborative annotation via Perusall.com; a link to a no-coding-required AI assistant; my book Unifying Political Methodology; and other class materials.

Strategies of Political Inquiry, Government 2010

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Year offered: 2010

Gary King, Robert Putnam, and Sidney Verba: not offered this academic year. If you could learn only one thing in graduate school, it should be how to do scholarly research. You should be able to assess the state of a scholarly literature, identify interesting questions, formulate strategies for answering them, have the methodological tools with which to conduct the research, and understand how to write up the results so they can be published. Although many graduate level courses address these issues of research design indirectly, we provide an explicit analysis of each. We take empirical evidence to be historical, quantitative, or anthropological and focus on the theory of descriptive and causal inference underlying both quantitative and qualitative research. Primarily for graduate students and undergraduates preparing for senior thesis research.

Attachments

Strategies of Political Inquiry, Government 2010 Syllabus

Workshop in Applied Statistics

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Year offered: 2017

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars, and others in the area to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different disciplines. Free lunch is provided. It is a great way to meet the community of data scientists across campus.