There is a myriad of ways to obtain scientific knowledge about social and political phenomena that political scientists are interested in better understanding and explaining. The main goal of this course is not to provide you with all such tools at our disposal, but with a survey of those, and necessary knowledge and basic skills to understand, evaluate, and conduct scientific research. Having been introduced to qualitative and quantitative reasoning, and political science methodology will help you develop the required skillset to \critically and \constructively evaluate other scholarly research as well as a sense of how your future research agenda, including but not limited to your M.A. thesis/Ph.D. dissertation, should look like.

Since research design constitutes the ``nuts and bolts'' of scientific research and, as political scientists, we should all be able to communicate ``what we think we know'' to our audience, this course will focus extensively on research design and communicating ``how we came to know what we think we know.'' Following a general introduction to the epistemology of science in the first part, you will therefore spend the second part of the semester thinking about how to approach puzzling social and political phenomena, conceptualize and operationalize various factors (that may or may not be) influencing them, design appropriate theoretical and empirical models, and communicate those to your audience (and write) effectively.