Comparative
political resear
, Lecture week 1 — Introduction to the course, s
of descriptive and inferential statistics, mea
levels
This week is more of a recap of BIS and MTSWO, later on it will get
interesting.
What is comparative politics? => International relations is about the
relation between countries, but comparative may seem to compare different
countries, but it mainly focusses on the systems within the countries. The
most important topics are for example party systems, political rights,
voters, electoral behavior, inequality, ideology and corruption.
This course has a deductive approach: starting with theory. We test the
expectations from the theory with the material we collect. This contrasts
with inductive: from results to theory. Also, we are only going to discuss quantitative
this aligns with the deductive approach, it explains instead of experience.
Concluding, quantitative research methods, following the deductive research approac
within the field of comparative politics!
There are two blocks: the first 3 weeks it is about survey research, the second 3 wee
experimental research and here is also a little bit of comparative method included
extensive, Bhattacherjee is to the point.
The unit of analysis is what we study: when surveys, it is the individual that fills in the
are comparing countries, the unit is de country! What the population consists of, where t
from. When collecting data, we try to put numbers to actual empirical
fruits => variables. These can be classified in a couple of ways: gender,
age, political preference and political trust on a Likert-scale should all be
measured differently!:
1. Nominal => the only thing that means something is that it is different:
1 is different than 2 but that doesn’t mean anything —> party
preference, choice of study
2. Ordinal => there is an ordering inside of this: 1 is better than 2. —>
political thrust
3. Equal intervals/interval => ordening, the difference between 1 and
2 is exactly the same as between 7 and 8 —> IQ scores
4. Natural zero/ratio => the same as above, but also a natural zero
point. —> income.
=> Bryman combines interval and ratio, because you can do both with
them. But why is it important? Because there are different statistical tests.
He adds the dichotomous variable: this can be a dummy variable.
=> See the powerpoint for practice!