New Tools for Social Scientsts: Advances and Applications in Research Methods

This volume reviews the most important recent advances in quantitative social science methodology. Broad coverage is given to techniques applicable to the study of a wide variety of topics. To better explain these techniques, each chapter includes an extensive treatment of just one or two substantive applications. Limited to a small number of applications, the authors are able to discuss the methodological choices involved in research to a degree rarely found in social science literature.

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1980. Major research and teaching interests include public policy, budgeting, state politics and research methodology. Berry’s primary areas of interest are public policy, American state politics, and research methodology. Throughout his career, his work has focused on explaining why governments make the policy choices they do, and improving the methodologies available for studying policy making. Among his current research projects are analyses of the impact of electoral competition on the policy choices made by state legislators, and the effect of state welfare policy on poverty in the United States. Berry’s current research on methodology focuses on the development of techniques for estimating econometric models with binary dependent variables, and methods for studying policy diffusion using geographical information systems. Berry has also been working for several years collecting data on outcomes of all state legislative elections in the U.S. since the 1960s; he has begun to use these data to study the behavior of challengers in state legislative elections, and the role of partisan and incumbent protection goals in determining the nature of redistricting in state legislatures.

Michael S. Lewis-Beck is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.  His interests are comparative elections, election forecasting, political economy, and quantitative methodology.  He has been designated the 4^th most cited political scientist since 1940, in the field of methodology. Professor Lewis-Beck has authored or co-authored over 240 articles and books, including Applied Regression: An Introduction, Data Analysis: An Introduction, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies, Forecasting Elections, The American Voter Revisited and French Presidential Elections.  He has served as an Editor of the American Journal of Political Science, the Sage QASS series (the green monographs) in quantitative methods and The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods.  Currently he is Associate Editor of International Journal of Forecasting and Associate Editor of French Politics.  In spring 2012, he held the position of Paul Lazersfeld University Professor at the University of Vienna. During the fall of 2012, he was Visiting Professor at Center for Citizenship and Democracy, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium.  In spring 2013, Professor Lewis-Beck was Visiting Scholar, Centennial Center, American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.  During fall 2013, he served as Visiting Professor, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. In spring, 2014, he was Visiting Scholar, Department of Political Science, University of Göteborg, Sweden.  For fall, 2014, he served as a Visiting Professor at LUISS University, Rome.  At present, he is co-authoring a book on how Latin Americans vote.