Analysing Political and Social Sequences

Short Bio Philippe Blanchard, PhD in political science, is an Assistant professor in political science at the University of Warwick, UK. He works on green politics, political communication, and methods for social and political sciences: multivariate statistics, longitudinal methods, interviewing and content analysis. He is presently conducting research about gendered careers in trade unions, transnational economic elites, and big data for political science. He has taught methods and techniques for social and political sciences in France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and the USA. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais Prerequisite knowledge Two prior knowledges are requested: - Basic applied statistics and use of data sets, through either an Excel-like software, statistics software like SPSS or Stata, or R. Participants who have never practiced any statistics should attend an introductory course or at least read an introductory textbook and practice by themselves. - Basic knowledge of R: data manipulation and basic descriptive statistics. Most of the laboratory work will be done in R. R-beginners may prepare themselves by attending beforehand an introductory course prior to the course, such as the Ljubljana SA102 course. Short course outline Sequence analysis is the systematic descriptive and causal study of sequences, that is, successions of standard categorical states or events. Sequence analysis is a unique method for representing, comparing and clustering sequences, for extracting prototypical sequences and for mining sequence populations. Its core tool, the optimal matching algorithm, imported from genetics and bio-computing, screens and discriminates longitudinal processes according to the nature of events, their duration and their order. Numerous fields in the social and political sciences are concerned with sequences, for example: life course analysis (e.g. family and residential transition from youth to adulthood), sociology of professional careers (such as gendered careers or transition to retirement), political sociology (elite and activist careers), evolution of regimes (stages of development or transition to democracy), speech analysis (rhetorical strategies), geopolitics (stages in crises or democratic transition), comparative studies (stages of diffusion of reforms or mobilizations), elections (stages of public opinion formation during campaigns), human geography (distribution of space occupation from city centre) and ethnographic practices (rituals).