Course Description
This course offers an integrated and hands-on introduction to political economy and R — no prior knowledge of either is required. Political economy is a subfield of political science that studies economic processes along the lines of distributional conflict, contested rule-making, and the power of interests and ideas. R is a free and open-source programming language for statistical computing and graphics. The point behind teaching both in one module is to allow students to get the best of both worlds. On the one hand, they will get a good sense for how to actually do political economy research: how to get data, how to bring them into the right shape, how to visualize them, and how to analyze them in basic ways. On the other hand, students will get a practical but also substantively interesting introduction to R. After basic introductions to both political economy and R, the module covers two substantive blocs: the political economy of climate change and the political economy of economic security, geopolitics, and industrial policy. In each bloc, students will read political economy scholarship and learn how to work with related data in R. The goal is not full replication of existing studies, but learning how to get, transform, and visualize political economy data to address substantively important questions.
