Regression analysis: candidate convergence in congressional elections. Analyzing the relationship between Democratic Presidential Vote share and the ideological gap between competing candidates. There is clear evidence of a non-linear relationship explaining the gap between the candidates. (Image courtesy of Prof. Stephen Ansolabehere.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Stephen Ansolabehere
MIT Course Number
17.874
As Taught In
Spring 2004
Level
Graduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This course is the second semester in the statistics sequence for political science and public policy offered in the Political Science Department at MIT. The intellectual thrust of the course is a presentation of statistical models for estimating causal effects of variables. The model of an effect is a conditional mean (though we might imagine other effect). The notion of causality is the effect of one variable on another holding all else constant.