Department of Political Science

Political Science
1414 Social Sciences Building
267 19th Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Phone: 612-624-4144
Fax: 612-626-7599
E-mail: polisci@umn.edu

Chair: Raymond D. Duvall

Rationale for New Methods Core Course at 8000 Level

Question and Answers for NEW METHODS CORE COURSE AT 8000 LEVEL (1)

  1. Course Number and Short Title: POL8120: Modeling Political Processes
  2. Course Number and Long Title: POL8120: Core Course in Political Methodology: Modeling Political Processes
  3. Catalogue Description (for Graduate School Course Listings)Overview of the methods used and potential for creating models of political processes with attention to important problems like designing political institutions, discerning and forecasting election outcomes, producing early warnings of international conflicts, and increasing turnout in elections. Survey of how political scientists use mathematics to study political strategy and collective decision making in committees and legislatures and statistics to measure political variables, design experiments with human subjects, and, more generally, test micro and macro political theories.
  4. Person who prepared proposal: Professor John R. Freeman; 624-6018; freeman@polisci.umn.edu
  5. Other Political Science faculty who, at some time, might teach the course: Profs. W.Philips Shively and James Druckman
  6. This a permanent addition to our graduate level curriculum in Political Science.
  7. How often will the course usually be offered: every other year
  8. Objectives. There are three main objectives. The first is to provide for the fourth field in our graduate program a "core" or gateway course to more advanced work in political methodology. Our graduate fields are political philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, and political methodology. All but the last field has a core or gateway course that provides students with an overview of its contents. The faculty and graduate students in political science agree that a fourth core course for political methodology is needed. This course will help our Ph.d. students understand how the general nature of and special challenges posed by mathematical and statistical approaches to the study of politics. Engendering a better sense of the limits and potential of these forms of political analysis the second objective. There is much debate in our discipline today about how best to study politics. This debate is engaged in our required introductory course for incoming graduate students (POL8101). The proposed course focuses on the positivist approach almost exclusively, but it does so in a way that builds on the work in our introductory courses. It challenges students to sort out the normatively significant problems and puzzles in the study of politics that are most amenable to positivist approaches and to develop research designs that can realize this potential. In this spirit a great deal of effort is devoted to illuminating the relative strengths and weaknesses of different models of politics. A third objective is to alert students to the efforts of the NSF and others to better marry mathematical and statistical approaches to the study of politics. To this end, tests of mathematical models of politics are critically evaluated; and, the lack of microfoundations for statistical models of political processes is emphasized. The newest work in the positivist tradition that provides for these tests and, at the same time, supplies these microfoundations are studied. This is research in the fields of American politics and international relations, work that advances our understanding of the workings of American democracy-the so-called coordination equilibrium that the electorate produces in the joint outcomes of general and mid-term elections, for example-and gauges the social welfare costs of electoral cycles vis-à-vis the economy. New technologies for forecasting state failure and other important international events also are reviewed in this last part of the course.
  9. Syllabus. See link at Methods and Model link on Graduate program site.
  10. What role in the Department's graduate program is this course designed to fill? Our program needs this new core course to create coherency and balance in its curriculum. All four of our fields need a core course. By taking this new core course, students who choose methodology as one of their fields can achieve the breadth of understanding in this field that they gain in the other fields in their graduate program (because they take a core core in that substantive field).. In addition, students who take the new core course in political methodology will have a deeper understanding of the limits and potential of positivist approaches to the study of politics.

    11. The other 8000 level courses in the political methodology field are much more focused studies of selected topics such as game theory (POL81240 or of time series analysis (POL8125). This is consistent with the overall structure of our graduate program: there is one general gateway course to the Ph.d. program (POL8101), a set of core courses for the main fields of study, and then a set of advanced, much more focused field research seminars. The proposed core course in political methodology eliminates the one gap in this structure (once more it is the only field graduate seminar we now don't offer).

  11. Why is this course offered only at the 8000 level (almost exclusively for Ph.D. students)? The material in the proposed course is too advanced for most undergraduates. And the new course is aimed to prepare students to actually conduct particular kinds of political research, something most undergraduates do not intend to do. [In rare circumstances, the instructor might allow an upperclassperson with sufficient background and aspirations for graduate education to enroll in the proposed course.]
  12. Relation to other units outside political science. The proposed course focuses on applications of natural science methods in the study of politics, not natural science methods per se. The purpose is to survey how political scientists have used natural science methods to the study of strategic decision making and collective decision making; and how they create and analyze political data.

It also is important to note that, as a core course for one of our four fields of graduate study, the proposed course surveys a range of methods with a single application, namely, the study of politics. In this sense its content is the mirror image of courses like MATH 8401&8402 which surveys many different applications of the same method (mathematical reasoning). The proposed course surveys methods that are taught in a variety of departments not a single course in one departments. For instance, consider the material in weeks III and XV of the proposed course. Decision theory is covered in STAT8111 while Bayesian predictive methods are addressed in STAT8131. (2)

The Department urges its graduate students to take courses in mathematics and statistics. For instance, in order that they can learn and enhance their understanding of hypothesis testing and inference, the Department, upon consultation with the Chair of the Statistics Department, urges students who specialize in political methodology to take STAT4101 and STAT 4102 (students with advanced training as undergraduates are encouraged to take STAT5101 and STAT5102). This recommendation actually appears in our on-line graduate program brochure.

Finally, the fact is that, while they earn top scores in the relevant parts of the GRE exam, our graduate students simply lack the undergraduate training needed for 8000 level coursework in natural sciences.

1. These questions come from the University of Minnesota 's Electronic Course Authorization System. The answers were supplied in the course proposal application. The course application was approved in the fall of 2004.

2. To my knowledge, few if any political science applications are taught in math and(or) statistics seminars. The math department occasionally offer a seminar on mathematical applications in biology (MATHXX) but not in mathematical applications in political science. Such applications are subject of each week's study in the proposed new course. Pedagogically the argument is that our graduate students will learn to be better political researchers if they have a course that focuses on applications in their own field rather than a range of fields.