Research Books - Page 3

Public Opinion: Democratic Ideals, Democratic Practice

Rosalee A. Clawson, Zoe M. Oxley

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Editorial Review:

Our national obsession with opinion polls reflects an assumption that what people think and believe matters. But does it? Do citizens endorse the basic principles of a democratic system? How much knowledge should they have? And do they organize their political thinking? In a new introductory text for public opinion courses, Clawson and Oxley clearly and systematically link these enduring normative questions of democratic theory to the existing empirical research on public opinion to explore the tension between those ideals and their practice.

After introducing these normative debates, the authors then assess how well theorists in political science as well as in related disciplines such as sociology and psychology have responded and the empirical evidence they have marshaled. Each subsequent chapter takes on one of those central questions and focuses on a handful of exemplary studies instead of synthesizing all of the relevant literature. Rather than overwhelming students with encyclopedic detail, students see how methods are applied within the context of specific studies, providing a richer understanding of the research process than a standalone methods chapter can offer.

Political Analysis: Technique and Practice (Political Science)

Louise G. White

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 1.0 of 5

Horribly edited 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is NOT a very good book. It is very basic, and at that, it can't get it right. The book is very poorly edited, which causes a lot of confusion.

Look elsewhere for information 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The one thing the book does well... It starts at the most basic level of introduction to research and goes up through statistical forumlas.

The problem is the information is sloppily put together. The author knows little or nothing about logic, and this, misuses it in ways that will damage the students ability to function in reasearch if they have no previous experience. There are also lots of nice charts, that you have to fill in yourself, making this feel like a paint-by-numbers rather than a textbook.

The author also lumps interval and ration data sets together. While when using formulas they are interchangable the one sentence inclusion of the two together does not give justice to the very different applications of interval and ratio data. Once again, if you take a stats class after this, you will suffer from the learning.

Highly NOT Recommended.

Editorial Review:

This text gives students the skills necessary for analyzing important political issues logically and systematically. Louise White guides students through the entire research design process step-by-step, from formulating sound questions and devising strategies for answering them to analyzing and presenting the results. Exercises throughout let students apply and practice these skills using examples based on real world data and current political events.

The IDEA BROKERS

Tom Smith

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Highly recommended ! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The Idea Brokers is an excellent chronological exploration of the evolution and impact of think tanks on U.S. public policy. The reader is presented with a comprehensive history of these obscure institutions that have spawned dramatically since the start of the 20th-century. The author adequately provides a thorough and detailed account of the personalities that were responsible for establishing these research institutions, their intended purpose, their area of expertise, their advising successes and their implementation failures. At the end, you will agree that these research insitutions will only play a much larger role in shaping government policy and public opinion in the coming years.

Editorial Review:

Gulliver thought the professors were out of their senses when he visited the Grand Academy of Lagado on the Isle of Balnibarbi. He was bemused by their many improbable schemes--extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, constructing houses from the rood down, and training pigs to plow with their snouts. Yet however bold and inventive the various projects and their 'projectors' (as he termed the scientists were, there remained something troubling about his visit to the academy, something fundamentally deficient about the experts and their ideas.

The Behavioral Origins of War

D. Scott Bennett, Allan C. Stam III

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Editorial Review:

The study of international relations has suffered from an oversupply of theories and a lack of comprehensive, comparative tests between them. In The Behavioral Origins of War, Bennett and Stam draw from the systemic, dyadic, and monadic levels of analysis to evaluate the relative strength of theories ranging from hegemonic stability to expected utility to democratic peace. Their expansive study challenges the conventional view of theories of war as competing explanations for observed behavior, and their argument incorporates key variables from several theories to account for the multiplicity of causes for war. They find that while many theories contribute to the overall prediction of international conflict, most are quite weak individually. By focusing on the relative explanatory power of a valid set of theories, Bennett and Stam chart a course for cumulative scientific progress in international relations.
D. Scott Bennett is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at The Pennsylvania State University. Allan C. Stam is Associate Professor in the Government Department at Dartmouth College.

Working with Political Science Research Methods: Problems and Exercises

Janet Buttolph Johnson, H. T. Reynolds

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Editorial Review:

Does the science part of political science cause your students to break out in a cold sweat? This companion workbook gives students the perfect opportunity to practice each of the methods presented in the text. To maximize their ability to master each technique, the workbook is organized to parallel the text chapter for chapter, breaking out each aspect of the research process into manageable parts, and comes with updated data sets and primary documents. Given invaluable feedback from adopters, this second edition workbook has been restructured so that exercises more consistently increase in complexity and degree of difficulty, and fuller, more explicit directions accompany problems.

A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem

Gary King

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book provides a solution to the ecological inference problem, which has plagued users of statistical methods for over seventy-five years: How can researchers reliably infer individual-level behavior from aggregate (ecological) data? In political science, this question arises when individual-level surveys are unavailable (for instance, local or comparative electoral politics), unreliable (racial politics), insufficient (political geography), or infeasible (political history). This ecological inference problem also confronts researchers in numerous areas of major significance in public policy, and other academic disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and marketing to sociology and quantitative history. Although many have attempted to make such cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all existing methods yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In this volume, Gary King lays out a unique--and reliable--solution to this venerable problem.

King begins with a qualitative overview, readable even by those without a statistical background. He then unifies the apparently diverse findings in the methodological literature, so that only one aggregation problem remains to be solved. He then presents his solution, as well as empirical evaluations of the solution that include over 16,000 comparisons of his estimates from real aggregate data to the known individual-level answer. The method works in practice.

King's solution to the ecological inference problem will enable empirical researchers to investigate substantive questions that have heretofore proved unanswerable, and move forward fields of inquiry in which progress has been stifled by this problem.

Summing Up: The Science of Reviewing Research

Richard J. Light, David B. Pillemer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent introduction to meta-analysis 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful.

It is essential for researchers to understand meta-analysis. This book, along with Wolf's pamphlet, Meta-Analysis (Sage), provides an exceptionally clear introduction.

Editorial Review:

How can a scientist or policy analyst summarize and evaluate what is already known about a particular topic? This book offers practical guidance.

Cross-Level Inference (Nber - Macroeconomics Annual)

Christopher H. Achen, W. Phillips Shively

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Editorial Review:

In the last several years, new disputes have erupted over the use of group averages from census areas or voting districts to draw inferences about individual social behavior. Social scientists, policy analysts, and historians often have little choice about using this kind of data, but statistical analysis of them is fraught with pitfalls. The recent debates have led to a new menu of choices for the applied researcher. This volume explains why older methods like ecological regression so often fail, and it gives the most comprehensive treatment available of the promising new techniques for cross-level inference.

Experts in statistical analysis of aggregate data, Christopher H. Achen and W. Philips Shively contend that cross-level inference makes unusually strong demands on substantive knowledge, so that no one method, such as Goodman's ecological regression, will fit all situations. Criticizing Goodman's model and some recent attempts to replace it, the authors argue for a range of alternate techniques, including estensions of cross-tabular, regression analysis, and unobservable variable estimators.

Rational Choice and Security Studies: Stephen Walt and His Critics (International Security Readers)

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Editorial Review:

Formal theories and rational choice methods have become increasingly prominent in most social sciences in the past few decades. Proponents of formal theoretical approaches argue that these methods are more scientific and sophisticated than other approaches, and that formal methods have already generated significant theoretical progress. As more and more social scientists adopt formal theoretical approaches, critics have argued that these methods are flawed and that they should not become dominant in most social-science disciplines.

Rational Choice and Security Studies presents opposing views on the merits of formal rational choice approaches as they have been applied in the subfield of international security studies. This volume includes Stephen Walt's article "Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Rational Choice and Security Studies," critical replies from prominent political scientists, and Walt's rejoinder to his critics.

Walt argues that formal approaches have not led to creative new theoretical explanations, that they lack empirical support, and that they have contributed little to the analysis of important contemporary security problems. In their replies, proponents of rational choice approaches emphasize that formal methods are essential for achieving theoretical consistency and precision.

Empirical Political Analysis: Research Methods in Political Science

Jarol B. Manheim, Richard C. Rich

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not worth $85.00 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I'm using this book for my undergrad political science class on research design and statistical analysis. I have previously used Johnson and Joslyn's book, which is much less expensive than Manheim and Rich. If I had known that the bookstore would charge the students so much, I would not have assigned it. The authors do a good job with research design, but the statistical section is poorly organized, and has at least one formula incorrect. If you are looking for a good book on empirical political analysis, you could probably find a better research design book and a better statistics book for about the same price.

Editorial Review:

Manheim, Jarol B.; Rich, Richard C.; Lars Willnat, Empirical Political Analysis: Research Methods in Political Science, 5th Edition*\ This well-established research methods book has been thoroughly updated to reflect the new technologies involved in research, as well as the emerging interest in systematic qualitative techniques. Comprehensive discussion of the research process that includes an abundance of examples drawn from political science to make concepts clear to readers. In-depth examination of major issues that integrates theory, hypotheses, data definition and gathering, and data analysis. For those interested in political science.