This course trains students aiming to select, use, and evaluate sophisticated research drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. The course builds to a final paper in which students propose a mixed method research design or draft of an early prospectus document. Students who enter the course with ongoing projects may workshop their designs in the most relevant week while leading class discussion. We begin the course with fundamental definitions and assumptions underpinning qualitative and quantitative methods in isolation and in combination. Next, we review and discuss common decisions researchers make when selecting cases, conducting process tracing, using regression in mixed-method studies, collecting data, and designing surveys and experiments. We conclude by discussing the research design choices of two completed projects to evaluate the qualitative and quantitative data in isolation and in combination.

Why do some autocratic governments spend decades in power while others collapse overnight? When do regime transitions lead to democratic outcomes? This course examines these questions through the lens of social movements and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa since the outbreak of the 2010-2011 Arab Spring. This course first engages with frameworks for defining the region and understanding Ottoman, colonial and independence era legacies on contemporary politics. We then move toward contemporary classifications of political regimes and global theories of autocratic persistence. We will then trace the trajectories of different countries before and after 2010-2011 while engaging with how scholars situated the uprising within long-running debates in political science. These debates include those on how historical and colonial legacies; cultural, ethnic and religious practices and divides; contemporary patterns of foreign intervention; repression and coercion; economic resources; and contentious politics influence contemporary political outcomes in the region.

• The Political Science Laboratory introduces undergraduate political scientists to the basic quantitative tools of political science research. The class explores key statistical and computational methods used to frame and answer empirical questions, with a particular focus on causal inference.
• Here is a short list of MENA-related datasets for students interested in developing data analysis skills.

• The Math Prefesher is designed to introduce and review core mathematics and programming prerequisites that students need to be successful in the graduate quantitative methods courses in the Political Science department and elsewhere at MIT.

• Research design and statistical methods for causal inference, including experiments, matching, regression, panel methods, difference-in-differences, synthetic control methods, instrumental variable estimation, regression discontinuity designs, causal mediation analysis, nonparametric bounds, and sensitivity analysis.