Social Sciences (SOCSC-UH)

This course introduces students to the basics of statistics and probability, which are building blocks for much of the research that is done in Social Science. The course gives students an overview of descriptive and inferential statistics, with emphasis on conceptual understanding and statistical thinking. There is heavy concentration on the big picture: What questions are we trying to address and what can we conclude from our analysis. Throughout the course real data from several social science disciplines will be integrated and studied using state of the art software tools. At the end of the semester students should know the difference between populations and samples, how to design experiments, how to summarize and analyze the results of a statistical experiment, how to test basic hypotheses and how to communicate statistical insights.

Why did some countries industrialize before others? How can we explain the great divergence in per capita income across countries? What are the social and political impacts of economic growth? What is the role of political institutions in underpinning economic progress? This course addresses these and other similar questions using simple tools from across the social sciences. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the role of economic incentives and political institutions in underpinning economic and social development. NOTE: Students may use CSTS-UH 1021EQ or HIST-UH 2010 in place of SOCSC-UH 1011 (GEPS) for Social Science Majors or Minors.

This course provides an introduction to topics in mathematics immediately relevant for social scientists beginning their studies in Economics, Political Science, or Social Research and Public Policy. Beginning with a review of sets and functions, the course covers key topics in univariate and integral calculus, optimization, and it introduces the notation associated with basic linear algebra. The course provides an introduction to mathematics as the lingua franca of modern social sciences, and focuses on employing mathematics to formulate and communicate theories within the social sciences.

This course offers students an introduction to how economists look at the world and approach problems. It focuses on individual economic decision-makers (households, business firms, and government agencies) and explores how they are linked together and how their decisions shape our economic life. Applications of supply and demand analysis and the role of prices in a market system are explored. Students are also exposed to the theory of the competitive firm, the idea of market failure, and policy responses. The course relies on cases and examples and incorporates readings to shed light on modern economic principles and their application to solving the problems that face the global economy.

This course provides an introduction to some of the primary questions in the study of politics and the theories used by political scientists to understand the world. Among other questions, students will consider why we live in nation states, why peaceful solutions can be so elusive, and why the will of the majority often goes unrealized. The course focuses on individual decision makers in the world of politics (citizens, voters, legislators) and explores how they are linked together and how their decisions shape political outcomes. The course also explores how political institutions, such as electoral rules or the design of legislatures, can structure the interactions of these actors. The course relies on cases and examples and incorporates readings from classical and contemporary sources to illustrate how these theories of political behavior and institutions can shed light on current political events.

This course provides an introduction to sociological analysis and the distinctive sociological way of thinking. It examines the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of social order, the social construction of reality, and the relationship between the individual and society. We will focus on big structural questions all the way to questions about face-to-face human interaction. Along the way, we will think about how evidence is used in sociological explanations, the relationship between the researcher and the researched, and how to effectively communicate sociological ideas in writing.

Building on Calculus or Mathematics for Social Sciences I, this course provides a further reaching study of mathematics immediately relevant for social science majors. Beginning with a review of univariate calculus and optimization, the discussion moves to the basics of linear algebra, multivariate calculus and tools related to the constrained optimization of functions. The last set of topics includes introductions to comparative statics and discrete-time dynamic optimization. The course focuses on employing mathematics to formulate and communicate theories within the social sciences, and illustrates the usefulness of mathematical results directly in terms of applications to models of optimizing agents.

This course examines the major approaches to empirical studies in the social sciences, and studies the relationship between social questions raised and methods employed. It offers skills in developing research designs for explorative, descriptive, explanatory, and evaluation research. Special attention is paid to causal inference and to the use of experiments in social research.

This course explores major works of Western political and social theory from the beginning of the modern era through the 1920s. Attention is paid to social and intellectual context, conceptual frameworks and methods, and contributions to contemporary social analysis. Theorists include Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Marx, Du Bois, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud.

In a world where interests and values often conflict, how should societies be governed? Which form of government is best? Have we reached what Francis Fukuyama famously termed 'The End of History' - the notion that there are no serious contenders to liberal democracy? Subjects in this course include ancient and modern theorists such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Burke as well as contemporary Chinese critics of Western liberal democracy. NOTE: Students may take either SOCSC-UH 1311 or PHIL-UH 2614 towards the Social Science Foundations SPET requirement.

This course focuses on major works that take a critical position vis-à-vis the Western canon. It will explore themes of power, identity, inequality, and social order in the context of modern nationalism, capitalism, and imperialism. To provide context, the course will begin with core thinkers from the Western canon, ranging from John Locke to Sigmund Freud. Then it will focus on the response of their critics, including feminists and postcolonial writers from across the globe such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Edward Said.

What is democracy? Since its inception, the concept of democracy, and perspectives on whom the people are that can or should partake in it, have evolved. This course will explore three key movements in the expansion of democracy: (i) against slavery, (ii) against the patriarchal institutions, and (iii) against colonialism. The course will then explore different understandings of democracy in the contemporary era, shedding light on its canonical liberal version, attempts at its expansions in non-centric countries, and recent criticisms of some of its foundations. Democracy is usually approached, understood and framed from the perspectives of well-established canons in the United States and Western European countries. Importantly, as part of this course, students will also be exposed to work on democracy from non-canonical perspectives and authors. The course relies on classical and contemporary readings and various materials that cut across the Social Sciences and Humanities.

This course introduces the basic concepts of elementary game theory in a way that allows students to use them in solving simple problems. Topics include: the basics of cooperative and non-cooperative game theory; basic solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium and the core; and the extensions of these solutions to dynamic games and situations of incomplete information. Students are exposed to a variety of simple games with varied and useful applications: zero-sum games; the Prisoner's Dilemma; coordination games; the Battle of the Sexes; repeated games; and elementary signaling games. The course relies on a wide array of example applications of game theory in the social sciences.

This course will teach students how to design and implement a survey, and what to do once the data is in. The course is practice oriented: the course will use a lot of examples and students will create their own survey design. Students will spend more than a quarter of the course learning Stata. At the end of this course students will be able to design and implement their own, high quality survey. Moreover, students will question much of the data that is collected by others because they know all the things that can go wrong in the process.

This course will provide students with the "foundations" to undertake research in social science. You will learn how to identify an interesting research question. You will be introduced to different approaches that social scientists take to answer these questions. And because many of the questions we are interested in are causal (What leads to Y? What is the impact of X?), you will learn about different strategies to get at causality. We will also discuss other key issues related to good research like transparency and ethics. This class is hands-on. During the course you will create your own research design. Furthermore, we will make use of examples to critically evaluate existing research. This class is highly recommended to students who plan to write a capstone or a research paper.

The computational analysis of large amounts of written material is becoming increasingly popular in the social sciences. Recent research has used textual analysis to examine, for example, attitudes, culture, and propaganda. This approach, however, raises many questions. What is textual data actually showing us? How representative are textual datasets? Does textual analysis provide insight into social mechanisms and causal processes? This course will address these, and related, questions by providing a foundational introduction to textual analysis for the social sciences. Students will read a combination of early, theory-oriented articles and recent, cutting-edge research. In addition, students will learn how to conduct textual analysis for the social sciences through a series of labs and an original final project.

This will be an applied course that will introduce students to the python programming environment. It is intended for students who want to apply statistical analysis, information visualization, machine learning, text analysis, and data collection techniques through popular python toolkits such as scipy, numpy, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, beautiful soup, scikit-learn, nltk, and more to gain insight into any data. By the end of this course, students will be able to: (1) take any tabular data, clean it, manipulate it, and run inferential statistical analysis, (2) identify best practices in data visualizations, (3) identify the difference between supervised (classification) and unsupervised (clustering) techniques, and identify which technique they need to apply for a particular dataset and need, as well as, engineer features to meet that need, (4) be able to perform basic text mining and text manipulation, and (5) be able collect large amounts of data via some form of automation. The basic programming knowledge expected involves knowing how to print statements, assign values to variables, write an if-statement, and write for and while loops. Students with no prior programming experience will be provided with a short (ungraded) assignment at the beginning of the course covering all the basic knowledge they expect to have in order to continue with the course.

This course continues the study of game theory and its applications to the social sciences. The course is divided into two parts. Part 1 studies non-cooperative game theory: Nash equilibrium in static games; extensions such as subgame perfection for dynamic games of complete information; Bayesian Nash equilibrium for static games with incomplete information; and sequential equilibrium (with refinements) for dynamic games with incomplete information. Applications to the social sciences include strategic choice of electoral platforms, collusion, lobbying, bargaining, and signaling. Part 2 studies cooperative game theory, including common solution concepts such as the core and the stable set, as well as hybrid topics such as coalition and network formation, or mechanism design. Applications include: political party formation; dynamic agenda-setting; the construction and implementation of voting rules; and the study of social networks.

This course focuses on the application of statistics and economic theory to problems of formulating and estimating models of economic behavior. Matrix algebra is developed as the main tool of analysis in regression. The course acquaints students with basic estimation theory and techniques in the regression framework and covers extensions such as specification error tests, heteroscedasticity, errors in variables, and simple time series models. An introduction to simultaneous equation modes and the concept of identification is also provided.

This course offers an accessible introduction to the new approach of "lab-in-the-field" experiments; in which researchers use laboratory methods to study human, social, economic, and political behavior with nontraditional (nonstudent, nonwestern) subjects. We will work with researchers at the lab established at the FLAME University, Pune India, a special partnership between FLAME and Nuffield College, Oxford. We will meet the researchers from FLAME in Goa, India. As part of the visit, we will learn about the experiments that have been conducted in India as well as see other cultural sights in the region. Students will have a chance to meet fellow students and researchers at the Centre and share their own experimental design with them and, ideally, participate in conducting an experiment with researchers from the laboratory. At the conclusion of the class, students may be able to participate in a special international three-day workshop on experiments in social sciences, jointly organized with Princeton University. Note that an A- or better grade in this course satisfies the course requirement for using the Social Science Experimental Laboratory at NY.