Headings: !!Resources for Political Sociology Courses !!!!Critical Thinking !!!!Data !!!!Using Data in the Classroom !!!!Previous Syllabi
- The National Election Study is an ongoing collection of national surveys organized by the University of Michigan since 1948 to assemble data on Americans' social backgrounds, enduring political predispositions, social and political values, perceptions and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinions on questions of public policy, and participation in political life. The 2000 National Election Study entailed both a pre-election interview and a post-election re-interview. Data and codebooks can be downloaded for free after registration. The data can also be analyzed on-line through the data engine at the Data Archive at Berkeley. There, the data set is available in three chunks: the cumulative 1952-1992 file, the 1996 data, and the 2000 data. Each of the previous links also offers a download option. The NES website also offers the cumulative 1952-2000 data set for download though registration is required.
- Freedom in the world country ratings, 1972- 2003 rank countries by political and civil liberties and rights; are produced by the Freedom House Organization. Data are also available for download
in Excel format. A map of freedom
can also be viewed. The site also offers an account of measurement methodology and country and regional reports.
- World Bank Indicators on-line offer some useful indicators such as the size of the economy or some free on-line databases. Much more data is accessible for paying subscribers. The World Bank also has a maps section with interactive maps where you can zoom-in or out according to your need. Topics include Life Expectancy, Infant Mortality, Population, Safe Water, Undernourished Children, Girls in School, Environment, Income Per Person, Income Growth, Agriculture Share in GDP, Information Share of GDP, Military Spending, Paved Roads, Telephone Lines, Personal Computers, and Mobile Phones and many others.
- Basic data about political behavior, voting and turnout can be found in this section of the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Older data can be viewed from the home page of the Statistical Abstract.
- County data from the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida. Data in text format with embedded descriptions for each of the 67 Florida counties. The file contains measurements of the type of voting machine used, the number of columns in the presidential ballot, the undervote, the overvote, and the official certified votes for each of the 12 presidential candidates. Of particular interest are, given the context, the Buchanan vote in Palm Beach county, and the overvote as explained by the voting machine type and number of columns on the ballot. Data compiled by Compiled by Brett Presnell (presnell@stat.ufl.edu), Department of Statistics, University of Florida. The data set was used, among other things, in Agresti & Presnell?s article "Misvotes, Undervotes, and Overvotes: The 2000 Presidential Election in Florida" published in Statistical Science, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1-5, 2002. Provided as a part of the Statistical Library at the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Vanderbilt university has the world's largest archive of television news. The collection holds more than 30,000 evening news broadcasts from the major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) plus other news-related programming. The database has an on-line search engine, and selected tapes may be obtained for a fee.
- U.S. Newspapers Archives on the Web is a collection of links to news archives available on the Internet, organized by state. Also has a collection of international news archives.
- Lexis-Nexis has a searchable database of news transcripts. Accessible from computers connected to the UCLA network (and to other subscribing organizations).
- Newsbank provides full-text access to 269 individual newspaper titles, including 47 California titles.
- Site for Instructional Materials and Information has a number of exercise modules available for classroom use. SIMI is an initiative of ICPSR aimed at sharing resources for undergraduate and graduate education. Sample class assignments are freely available to members of other member institutions including UCLA. Contains about 55 (as of April 2004) teaching modules, most of them quite advanced. Contains downloadable data files in various formats (STATA, SPSS, etc.), references to literature and more. Examples include:
- POL SCI 141B LEC 1: Electoral Politics: Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, a class taught at UCLA by John Zaller in Political Science, uses graphs as lecture and test material. Zaller reports this as a successful model that gets students more engaged with data, helps them understand it better, and gives them more skill to correctly interpret quantitative material. (more feedback and description of the class provided by John Zaller here)
- John Zaller and Dan Posner in Political Science (UCLA) teach a pair of classes, "Introduction to comparative politics" and "Introduction to data analysis". The classes were previously taught separately, but are now offered jointly as co-requisites. The PS6 class has a component taught by Marisa Kellam, which is listed separately by SSCNET, but essentially parallels John Zaller's version of PS6. The class web sites offer downloadable data in STATA format, pre-packaged statistical tools in Excel (e.g. SD calculator, normal curve generator, correlation calculator etc.), an overview of some basic and useful STATA commands
. Also check their extensively annotated data file , which took a lot of effort to put together and on which most of the class assignments are based. Specific assignments include 1st data essay on comparative economic development, 2nd data essay on political and social change and 3dr data essay and midterm on Ideology, inequality, and turnout , or the 4th data essay on Democracy and Development.
- Champagne, S04
- Lupher, W04
- Sherwood, F03
- O'Connell, Summer03
- Sherwood, W03
- Emery, Summer03
- Roy, W02
- Lal, F01, class assignments:1st assignment, 2nd assignment
- Lupher, S01
- Desai, S00
- Lal, F99
History
Last edited Wednesday, 27 April 2005 at 14:48 by mk
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