Gary King – författare

This book contains some of the newest, most exciting ideas now percolating among political scientists, from hallway conversations to conference room discussions. To spur future research, enrich classroom teaching, and direct non-specialist attention to cutting-edge ideas, a distinguished group of authors from various parts of this sprawling and pluralistic discipline has each contributed a brief essay about a single novel or insufficiently appreciated idea on some aspect of political science. The one hundred essays are concise, no more than a few pages apiece, and informal. While the contributions are highly diverse, readers can find unexpected connections across the volume, tracing echoes as well as diametrically opposed points of view. This book offers compelling points of departure for everyone who is concerned about political science -- whether as a scholar, teacher, student, or interested reader.

This book contains some of the newest, most exciting ideas now percolating among political scientists, from hallway conversations to conference room discussions. To spur future research, enrich classroom teaching, and direct non-specialist attention to cutting-edge ideas, a distinguished group of authors from various parts of this sprawling and pluralistic discipline has each contributed a brief essay about a single novel or insufficiently appreciated idea on some aspect of political science. The one hundred essays are concise, no more than a few pages apiece, and informal. While the contributions are highly diverse, readers can find unexpected connections across the volume, tracing echoes as well as diametrically opposed points of view. This book offers compelling points of departure for everyone who is concerned about political science -- whether as a scholar, teacher, student, or interested reader.

This book provides a solution to the ecological inference problem, which has plagued users of statistical methods for over seventy-five years: How can researchers reliably infer individual-level behavior from aggregate (ecological) data? In political science, this question arises when individual-level surveys are unavailable (for instance, local or comparative electoral politics), unreliable (racial politics), insufficient (political geography), or infeasible (political history). This ecological inference problem also confronts researchers in numerous areas of major significance in public policy, and other academic disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and marketing to sociology and quantitative history. Although many have attempted to make such cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all existing methods yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In this volume, Gary King lays out a unique--and reliable--solution to this venerable problem. King begins with a qualitative overview, readable even by those without a statistical background. He then unifies the apparently diverse findings in the methodological literature, so that only one aggregation problem remains to be solved. He then presents his solution, as well as empirical evaluations of the solution that include over 16,000 comparisons of his estimates from real aggregate data to the known individual-level answer. The method works in practice. King''s solution to the ecological inference problem will enable empirical researchers to investigate substantive questions that have heretofore proved unanswerable, and move forward fields of inquiry in which progress has been stifled by this problem.