Stephen Van Evera greeted new graduate students at MIT with a commonsense introduction to qualitative methods in the social sciences. His helpful hints, always warmly received, grew from a handful of memos to an underground classic primer. That primer evolved into a book of how-to information about graduate study, which is essential reading for graduate students and undergraduates in political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and history—and for their advisers. •How should we frame, assess, and apply theories in the social sciences? "I am unpersuaded by the view that the prime rules of scientific method should differ between hard science and social science. Science is science." •A section on case studies shows novices the ropes. •Van Evera contends the realm of dissertations is often defined too narrowly “Making and testing theories are not the only games in town. . . . If everyone makes and tests theories but no one ever uses them, then what are they for?" •In "Helpful Hints on Writing a Political Science Ph.D. Dissertation," Van Evera focuses on presentation, and on broader issues of academic strategy and tactics. •Van Evera asks how political scientists should work together as a community. “All institutions and professions that face weak accountability need inner ethical rudders that define their obligations in order to stay on course."

Renowned for its international coverage and rigorous selection procedures, this series provides the most comprehensive and scholarly bibliographic service available in the social sciences. Arranged by topic and indexed by author, subject and place-name, each bibliography lists and annotates the most important works published in its field during the year of 1997, including hard-to-locate journal articles. Each volume also includes a complete list of the periodicals consulted.

Understand the “how” and the “why” behind research in political science. Political Science Research Methods by Janet Buttolph Johnson, H. T. Reynolds, and Jason D. Mycoff helps you to understand the logic behind research design by guiding you through a step-by-step process that explains when and why a researcher would pursue different kinds of methods. The highly anticipated Ninth Edition of this trusted resource provides more international examples, an increased focus on the role ethics play in the research process, increased attention to qualitative research methods, and expanded coverage on the role of the internet in research and analysis.

Providing expert advice from established scholars in the field of political science, this engaging book imparts informative guidance on teaching research methods across the undergraduate curriculum. Written in a concise yet comprehensive style, it illustrates practical and conceptual advice, alongside more detailed chapters focussing on the different aspects of teaching political methodology.

Field research - leaving one's home institution in order to acquire data, information or insights that significantly inform one's research - remains indispensable, even in a digitally networked era. This book, the first of its kind in political science, reconsiders the design and execution of field research and explores its role in producing knowledge. First, it offers an empirical overview of fieldwork in the discipline based on a large-scale survey and extensive interviews. Good fieldwork takes diverse forms yet follows a set of common practices and principles. Second, the book demonstrates the analytic benefits of fieldwork, showing how it contributes to our understanding of politics. Finally, it provides intellectual and practical guidance, with chapters on preparing for field research, operating in the field and making analytic progress while collecting data, and on data collection techniques including archival research, interviewing, ethnography and participant observation, surveys, and field experiments.

The third edition of Research Methods for Political Science retains its effective approach to helping students learn what to research, why to research and how to research. The text integrates both quantitative and qualitative approaches to research in one volume and covers such important topics as research design, specifying research problems, designing questionnaires and writing questions, designing and carrying out qualitative research and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative research data. Heavily illustrated, classroom tested, exceptionally readable and engaging, the text presents statistical methods in a conversational tone to help students surmount "math phobia." Updates to this new edition include: Research topics chapters have been upgraded and expanded. Two mixed methods design chapters have been added. A new chapter on hermeneutic analysis designs and research with large data sets. The chapter on multivariate statistics has been expanded, with an expanded discussion on logistic regression. Tools on how to prepare and present research findings are now featured in the appendix, allowing instructors more flexibility when teaching their courses. Research Methods for Political Science will give students the confidence and knowledge they need to understand the methods and basics skills for data collection, presentation and analysis.

Rich in historical detail and theoretical insight, Wars of Revelation explains why the United States' military interventions have repeatedly transformed its global role - and what that means for the future of American grand strategy. More than seventy-five years since the end of World War II, military interventions - rather than major wars - have emerged as a defining feature of contemporary geopolitics. Yet, for all the fierce policy debates over interventions and their lessons, scholars have largely ignored the systematic linkages between these smaller-scale wars and transformations in the grand strategies of states that prosecute them. In Wars of Revelation, Rebecca Lissner explains why military interventions can be crucibles of grand strategy, testing strategic axioms on the battlefield and prompting combatant states to reconceive their global roles. Through detailed historical case studies of US involvement in the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars, Lissner shows how each intervention generated searing insights into the capabilities and intentions of America's international adversaries - as well as the potential and limits of its own national power. By focusing on these three "wars of revelation," Lissner presents a fresh perspective on the origins and evolutions of US grand strategy, from the dawn of the Cold War to its twilight. Persuasively argued and historically illuminating, Wars of Revelation is essential reading for anyone who crafts, studies, or follows international security policy.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science contains twenty-seven freshly written chapters to give the reader a panoramic introduction to philosophical issues in the practice of political science. Simultaneously, it advances the field of Philosophy of Political Science by creating a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and practicing political scientists contribute and discuss. These philosophical discussions are close to and informed by actual developments in political science, making philosophy of science continuous with the sciences, another aspiration that motivates this volume. The chapters fall under four headings: (1) evaluating theoretical frameworks in political science; (2) methodological challenges and reconciliations; (3) the purposes and uses of political science; and, (4) the interactions between political science and society. Specific topics discussed include the biology of political attitudes, intra-agent mechanisms, rational choice explanations, theories of collective action, explaining institutional change, conceptualizing and measuring democracy, process tracing, qualitative comparative analysis, interpretivism and positivism, mixed methods, within-cause causal inference, evidential pluralism, lab and field experiments, external validity, contextualization, prediction, expertise, clientelism, feminism, values, and progress in political science.

Acting Alone: A Scientific Study of American Hegemony and Unilateral Use-of-Force Decision Making is a straight-forward analysis of unilateral U.S. military actions, which are dependent upon the power disparity between the U.S. and the rest of the world. In solving the puzzle as to why individual presidents have made the "wrong" decision to act alone, the author lays out a president's behavior, during a crisis, as a two-step decision process. Acting Alone reviews the well-studied first decision, deciding to use force, based on international conflict literature and organized along traditional lines. The author then details the second decision, deciding to use unilateral force, with an explanation of the criticisms of multilateralism and the reasons for unilateralism. To test a new theory of unilateral use of force decision making, Acting Alone devises a definition and coding rules for unilateral use of force, develops a sequential model of presidential use of force decision making, and constructs a new, alternative measure of military power, a Composite Indicator of Military Revolutions (CIMR). It then uses three methods - a statistical test with a heckman probit model, an experiment, and case studies - to test U.S. crisis behavior since 1937.By applying these three methods, the author finds that presidents are realists and make expected utility calculations to act unilaterally or multilaterally after their decision to use force. The unilateral decision, in particular, positively correlates with a wide military gap with an opponent, an opponent located in the Western hemisphere, and a national security threat.