Multiple Paths to Knowledge in International Relations provides a uniquely valuable view of current approaches and findings in conflict studies. This volume showcases work informed by four powerful research tools: rational choice theory and game theory; simulation, experimentation, and artificial intelligence; quantitative studies; and case studies. Each research method is introduced and evaluated for its specific potential, including both strengths and weaknesses. Throughout, the...

"A compelling case for transforming how research methods are taught to undergraduate students of political science." — London School of Economics Review of BooksEach year, tens of thousands of students who are interested in politics go through a rite of passage: they take a course in research methods. Many find the subject to be boring or confusing, and with good reason. Most of the standard books on research methods fail to highlight the most important con...

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

Research Methods in Africana Studies is a major contribution to the discipline of Africana studies and social science involving people of African descent in general. This textbook is the first of its kind, offering instruction on how to conduct culturally relevant critical research on Africana communities in the American context, in addition to the African diaspora. It contains a collection of the most widely used theories and paradigms designed for exploring, explaining, and adva...

In this 1992 book John Zaller develops a comprehensive theory to explain how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences. Using numerous specific examples, Zaller applies this theory to the dynamics of public opinion on a broad range of subjects, including domestic and foreign policy, trust in government, racial equality, and presidential approval, as well as voting behaviour in U.S. House, Senate, and presidential elections...

This book presents a series of essays by I. William Zartman outlining the evolution of the key concepts required for the study of negotiation and conflict management, such as formula, ripeness, pre-negotiation, mediation, power, process, intractability, escalation, and order.Responding to a lack of useful conceptualization for the analysis of international negotiation, Zartman has developed an analytical framework and specific concepts that can serve as a basis for both study and p...

This book examines how new empirical approaches to mediation can shed fresh light on the effectiveness of different patterns of conflict management, and offers guidelines on the process of international mediation.International conflict mediation has become one of, if not the most prominent and important conflict resolution methods of the early 21st century. This book argues that traditional approaches to mediation have been inadequate, and that in order to really understand how the...

In 1788 John Adams created a sublime ambition for all nations - 'a government of laws and not of men'. In the intervening years we have come to learn that legislation itself works through the interpretations of the many men and women who work on the inside and the outside of the law. Effective regulation thus depends not only on scrupulous legal analysis, with its appeal to precedent, conceptual clarity and argumentation, but also on sound empirical research, which often reveals divers...

This text starts by explaining the fundamental goal of good political science research—the ability to answer interesting and important questions by generating valid inferences about political phenomena. Before the text even discusses the process of developing a research question, the authors introduce the reader to what it means to make an inference and the different challenges that social scientists face when confronting this task. Only with this ultimate goal in mind will students be abl...

A clear and comprehensive framework for bridging the widening gap between theorists and empiricists in social scienceThe credibility revolution, with its emphasis on empirical methods for causal inference, has led to concerns among scholars that the canonical questions about politics and society are being neglected because they are no longer deemed answerable. Theory and Credibility stakes out an opposing view—presenting a new vision of how, working togeth...

Political protest and social movements are ubiquitous phenomena. This book focuses on the current theoretical approaches that aim at explaining them: the theory of collective action, the resource mobilization perspective, political opportunity structure theory, the identity approach, the framing perspective, and the dynamics of contention approach. The book has three objectives: (1) Many basic concepts like political opportunities or identity are not clearly defined. It is further often a ...

This open access book brings together a set of original studies that use cutting-edge computational methods to investigate conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence. Methodologically, this book covers a variety of computational approaches from text mining and machine learning to agent-based modelling and social network analysis.Empirical cases range from migration policy framing in North America and street protests in Iran to violence against civil...