University of Toronto Undergraduate and Graduate Courses:

POL478/POL2578: Experiments in Politics: Application (Undergraduate and Graduate Course)

This course is designed to provide the tools necessary to design and implement social science experiments along with the skills for analyzing and interpreting experimental results. We will discuss issues of causal inference, measurement, validity, and ethics in experimental design. Students will also learn about different experimental modes, how to program online experiments, and will work on analyzing experimental data. Much of the course will be structured like a lab-style seminar in which we collectively design, field, analyze, and write up an experimental study on political behavior. The ultimate goal is to publish a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal – an ambitious project that will require substantial commitment from every student.

POL478: Experiments in Political Science; Renamed POL440 Experimental Thinking: Foundations

Experiments are a central methodology in political science. Scholars from every subfield regularly turn to experiments. Practitioners rely on experimental evidence in evaluating social programs, policies, institutions, and information provision. The design, implementation, and analysis of experiments raise a variety of distinct epistemological and methodological challenges. This is particularly true in political science due to the breadth of the discipline, the varying contexts in which experiments are implemented (e.g., laboratory, survey, field), and the distinct methods employed (e.g., psychological or economic approaches to experimentation). This class will review the challenges to experimentation, discuss how to implement experiments, and survey prominent applications.

POL382: Elections & Voting

This course aims to introduce students to the essential elements for understanding the electoral process. The course will first present an introduction to the origin and objectives of elections. It will then address electoral procedures and their impact on electoral participation, party systems and the determinants of vote choice.

POL491/ POL2102H1F: Political Participation: Who gets Elected? (Undergraduate and Graduate Course); Renamed POL382: Political Representation

Who serves in Parliament and other legislatures? Do the backgrounds of politicians affect how policies are decided and which policies get adopted? This seminar explores the political representation of different groups in society, and the consequences of representation for policy outcomes. Topics include the representation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, class interests, youth, LGBTQ+, religious groups, and other social divisions.

POL214: Canadian Government

This course introduces students to the Canadian political system, including the Constitution and its institutional pillars: cabinet and parliament, federalism, the courts and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Topics covered include political parties, ideology, the media, diversity, language politics, indigenous peoples, and contemporary issues.

Queens University Undergraduate Course:

POL 312: Political Behaviour

This course examines how citizens think, feel and act with regards to politics, and how their voting behaviour reflects those opinions and their demographic characteristics. It will also introduce students how to read and understand statistical tables in political behaviour. The course will explore topics such as public opinion, political knowledge, partisanship, participation, campaigns, political representation and so forth. The readings will mostly be from the American and Canadian contexts.

One goal of the course is to cover the basic literature in political behavior and associated aspects of public opinion. A second goal is to introduce students to political research through direct experience on: how to choose a topic, formulate specific hypotheses or expectations, look for available data, and discuss their contribution to the literature in designing a research proposal.

Here is a guide I prepared on how to interpret regression tables. Also available on GitHub.

Workshops:

I put together two workshops to introduce students to tools for both presenting and conducting research. The first workshop introduced students on how to write papers and their CV in LaTeX. In a subsequent workshop, I showed students how to program their surveys in Qualtrics.

1. Writing in LaTeX (Here are my materials)
2. Designing a Survey on Qualtrics (Here is a tip that could save you a lot of hours)