Political Analysis

Statistics are part of our everyday life: from polling and elections to advertising claims, we confront numerical claims all the time. Rather than being swayed by bad arguments and questionable correlations, this book introduces you to the most common and contemporary statistical methods so that you can better understand the world. 

This is the most accessible guide to using statistics in Politics and IR research. Praised for being intuitive and engaging, this textbook walks you through the most common tools – from crosstabs to correlations; from multiple to logistic regression – in a way that couldn’t be more different than dull number crunching or complicated techniques. Instead, it empowers you to decide the best means to analyse a problem.

Fully updated and revised throughout, this new edition is accompanied by four workbooks that provide both practical and theoretical examples using different statistical software: SPSS, Stata, R, and Python. Simply choose the relevant workbook and learn how to do your own statistical analysis with the included activities, screenshots and step-by-step instructions.

This text is essential for anyone looking to become proficient in statistics: whether that’s to gain statistical literacy, to complete your thesis, to boost your value on the job market, or to become an active and informed consumer of current affairs.

Why let other people explain the world to you?

Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Author Biography

Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna (Italy). He is also co-founder of the Center for Research and Social Progress. He has taught quantitative methods to undergraduate and graduate students since 2003. He has held academic positions in the United States (Georgetown University; University of Mississippi), the United Kingdom (Nuffield Fellow, Oxford; University of Kent), and Italy (Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute, Florence; University of Bologna) in addition to visiting positions at Sciences Po – Institut d′Etudes Politiques de Grenoble (France), the University of Georgia (USA); Davison College (USA); St. Antony’s College (Oxford, UK); Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung: (Germany), and the University of Debrecen (Hungary). His research interests include in the field of Political Behavior in Europe, particularly as it relates to how individuals perceive and make sense of politics (recent examples focusing on political attitudes include International Political Science Review, Political Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy). Recent publications also include co-authored work that incorporate party competition with recent publications in Government and Opposition, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Common Market Studies. He lives with his family in Italy.