Quantitative Political Science I

Preface

These are the course notes for Prof. Brenton Kenkel’s course PSCI 2300 (Quantitative Political Science I: Computing) at Vanderbilt University.

PSCI 2300 is an introductory course on data analysis for political science. The course is intended to get students up and running with R programming and simple data analysis techniques, without going too deeply into math or statistics. Before using these techniques for high-stakes research, whether in academia or the private sector, you’ll want to get deeper coverage from more advanced courses and sources.

These notes are written in Quarto and published on GitHub Pages. You can find the Quarto source files on GitHub.

Acknowledgments: I’ve taken a lot from lecture notes written by my colleague Josh Clinton for prior iterations of PSCI 2300. My colleague Jim Bisbee’s notes for his offering of DS 1000 have been helpful too. I’m also grateful to students from the fall 2024 offering of PSCI 2300 for their suggestions, and to Nguyen Ha who gave lots of helpful feedback in her capacity as the TA.