The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology

Janet Box-Steffensmeier is the Vernal Riffe Professor of Political Science, Director of the Program in Statistics and Methodology, and courtesy faculty of Sociology at the Ohio State University. She holds a B.A. in mathematics and political science from Coe College (1988), and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Texas at Austin (1993). Henry Brady is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He teaches undergraduate courses on political participation and party systems and graduate courses on advanced quantitative methodology. David Collier is Professor of Political Science at UC BerkeleyProfessor. His fields are comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His latest book is Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), of which he is co-editor and co-author with his Berkeley colleague Henry E. Brady.

• PART I: INTRODUCTION ; PART II: APPROACHES TO SOCIAL SCIENCE METHODOLOGY ; PART III: CONCEPTS AND MEASUREMENT ; PART IV: CAUSALITY AND EXPLANATION IN SOCIAL RESEARCH ; PART V: EXPERIMENTS, QUASI-EXPERIMENTS AND NATURAL EXPERIMENTS ; PART VI: QUANTITATIVE TOOLS FOR DESCRIPTIVE AND CAUSAL INFERENCE: GENERAL METHODS ; PART VII: QUANTITATIVE TOOLS FOR DESCRIPTIVE AND CAUSAL INFERENCE: SPECIAL TOPICS ; PART VIII: QUALITATIVE TOOLS FOR DESCRIPTIVE AND CAUSAL INFERENCE ; PART IX: ORGANIZATIONS, INSTITUTIONS, AND MOVEMENTS IN THE FIELD OF METHODOLOGY

This Handbook contains an extraordinary collection of magisterial articles by many of the best methodological minds in political science. Prominent statisticians, econometricians, and sociologists who have taken an interest in our inferential problems are also well represented. The range is broad and substantive, with quantitative, qualitative, formal-theoretic, historical, and mixed methods discussed in relation to all the empirical subfields of the discipline. Every sect will find something to its taste, and those who celebrate the methodological diversity of the profession will have a feast. The articles are written to be accessible, and graduate students will find no better place to begin developing their own methodological judgment. This book is a splendid achievement.