BIO

Alexander is a UROP student in their final semester at FSU, majoring in political science and minoring in philosophy. His political interest are in the areas of economic and conflict analysis. After graduating, he will be attending law school in St. Louis in Missouri hoping to do criminal law upon graduating.

Theory and Hypothesis With Panel Data

Abstract

In political science research, researchers are generally concerned with using counterfactuals to determine the effect of a treatment variable. Counterfactuals are relatively easy to understand when data are only measured at one time period. However, in panel data (where multiple units are measured across a given length of time) formulating counterfactuals is much more complicated, because there is a lot more data involved. This added complexity means that there often is a lack of transparency of the difference between the theoretical hypothesis and what the data measures. In this project, we performed a literature review of articles from top international relations journals, hand-coded the kinds of data used for the articles and contrasted that with what would be expected based on the framing of their hypotheses. The goal of this research is to provide context that is important
for interpreting political science research to close the gap between theory and hypothesis.

Keywords: Panel Data, Quantitative,