IThe course requires that your group latches on to an original idea and test it with data. While you may have many ideas about what to study, distilling those ideas is often difficult and finding the appropriate data is problematic. I am going to ask you to do a great deal in a very short time. To make your life easier, I am going to have you study yourselves (or at least your Rice environment). Since 2016 I have been following various entering classes. In particular the Class of 2020 has been closely studied – including the last several years since graduation. You will have access to a substantial amount of data that includes behaviors and attitudes over time. During this time period there were two Presidential elections, Hurricane Harvey, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the usual battles over Beer Bike. I will work with you in helping your group focus on an appropriate political science topic. As you will find, especially from the readings, it is difficult to separate political science from the social sciences writ large. The only thing that will hold you back is a lack of imagination.
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In this course and the research practicum offered next semester you will begin to learn how to conduct basic research in social science. I will focus on the issues of theory construction, research design, and measurement, as well as how best to communicate your research to the scholarly community. The goal is that by the end of the year you should be able to design and conduct a variety of research projects, to read the professional literature competently, and to pass the "basic tools" exam.
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This course is an introduction to Institutional Analysis and Design. The study of political institutions has been the bread and butter of political science since Aristotle. This course moves past classical institutionalism and treats contemporary ways of analyzing individual behavior in institutions. Try to keep an open mind. In the course you will be reading material gathered from a number of different disciplines. You will be introduced to a number of ways of thinking about the role of institutions for constraining behavior as well as encouraging behavior.
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