Political Analysis Using R

This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly. It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well. By the end of the first seven chapters, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. The remaining four chapters will begin to introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available such as how to use contributed libraries or write programs in R. The book details how to perform nearly every task routinely associated with statistical modeling: descriptive statistics, basic inferences, estimating common models, and conducting regression diagnostics. For the intermediate or advanced reader, the book aims to open up the wide array of sophisticated methods options that R makes freely available. It illustrates how user-created libraries can be installed and used in real data analysis, focusing on a handful of libraries that have been particularly prominent in political science. The last two chapters illustrate how the user can conduct linear algebra in R and create simple programs. A key point in these chapters will be that such actions are substantially easier in R than in many other programs, so advanced techniques are more accessible in R, which will appeal to scholars and policy researchers who already conduct extensive data analysis. Additionally, the book should draw the attention of students and teachers of quantitative methods in the political disciplines.

James Monogan is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. After completing his B.A. in political science at the University of South Carolina in 2003, he attended the University of North Carolina where he earned his M.A. in 2005 and Ph.D. in 2010. He then worked as a visiting assistant professor for the Center for Applied Statistics and Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis until he began work at UGA in 2011. James’s research and teaching has focused on political methodology and American political behavior. As a political methodologist, his research has focused on geospatial data analysis and time series analysis. In the area of political behavior, he addresses questions about representation in the United States.