CCNER short course New Approaches to Comparative Electoral Research

This one-day workshop will address two principal objectives: it will examine issues surrounding case selection and it will explore new methods of establishing the boundaries of certainty and uncertainty in findings where standard sampling theory does not apply. Some of the substantive research used to illustrate these problems and how to deal with them will analyse the causes and consequences of competitiveness. Leading academics in the field will present papers on these topics in two sessions, followed by questions and discussion among all workshop participants. Simon Jackman (Stanford), Ryan Bakker (Georgia), and Mark Pickup (Simon Fraser) will discuss Bayesian analysis in the morning session, while Nicholas Weller (University of Southern California) and Susan Banducci (Exeter) will explore research on case selection in presentations that will be both instructional and focused on a substantive issue in electoral research. While we will not insist that these papers use secondary data, it is likely that at least some of them will draw on existing cross-national datasets such as the CSES and that issues of data quality, missing data, and data management will be raised too.

Thus, this short course provides an introduction to some of the most salient issues in cross-national electoral research and new methodologies that can be used to address them. Sponsored by Comparative Cross National Electoral Research (a four year project funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council), the course is ideally suited for both graduate students and faculty members who are working on cross-national electoral research and those who would like to learn more about cutting edge approaches for dealing with methodological problems in cross-national electoral research, but may also be of interest to graduate students and faculty members engaged in within-country comparative electoral research.