PSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Comparative Politics, Falsifiability
22 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
The transformation of private preferences into public choices. Comparative politics-the study and comparison of how people make decisions around the world. Focuses on: patterns of concerning political events (elections, campaigns, patterns pertaining to historical eras (cold war, enlightenment, patterns concerting recently relevant events. Studying comparative politics: looking at countries that share attributes but experience different political outcomes, countries that are different that have similar political outcomes, hypothesis-links cause to effect. Correlation vs. causation: correlation-observed association between two variables, causation-when an event or process that produces observable outcome. Challenges to comparative politics: can"t isolate variables in the real world, identifying causation is hard, separating correlation and causation, assessing unreliable data. Research methods: quantitative research-relies of statistical data, ex: death toll, gdp, etc. Disad: can"t represent human environment in numbers: qualitative: interviews, field research, etc. Disad: can get bogged down in details, validity.
