Political Analysis : A Guide to Data and Statistics

An easy-to-use guide to the intuition behind statistical methods in politics and IR research. Packed with examples from the UK and Europe, this text features a suite of examples and exercises and, new for the second edition, is supplemented with online workbooks and code to help you use the techniques in the book using R, SPSS, Stata and Python.

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.