What this blog is about

This blog has been created to provide a forum for members of the Columbia poli sci community working in comparative political economy to discuss issues related to their research.

The general intention is to create a place for PhD students to discuss, but faculty are also very welcome to contribute as a way to communicate to grad students about issues in CPE and to initiate discussion associated with their own research.

By focusing on "comparative political economy" the blog privileges discussion of a certain subset of topics in the broader comparative politics research domain:

• Perhaps the least restrictive are the substantive parameters: pretty much any subject within comparative politics is in, including social policy, voting, political violence, regime transitions and regime stability, economic development, political development, electoral systems, social movements, etc.
• But more restrictive are the methodological commitments, which include discussion of statistical methods, writing and interpreting formal theories, causality and inference, research design, social science measurement/data, and concept development for social-scientific research.

So let's make this a place to post and discuss ideas about research projects (both those in the works and ones that we wish we could do if we had time), musings on things that you have read or heard, links to interesting papers or webpostings, thoughts carried over from conversations, questions about methods, links to information on new data, etc. There are a couple of posts below that give some flavor.

Cheers,
Cyrus