POLn6018 Electoral Data Management

Faculty of Social Studies
Spring 2024
Extent and Intensity
1/1/0. 4 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
Mgr. Petr Voda, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
Mgr. Petr Voda, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science – Faculty of Social Studies
Contact Person: Mgr. Lucie Pospíšilová
Supplier department: Department of Political Science – Faculty of Social Studies
Timetable
Thu 12:00–13:40 PC26
Prerequisites
Ability to work with MS Excel and basic knowledge concerning electoral systems.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
The aim of the course is to teach students how to work with quantitative data (searching, downloading, organizing and merging data) that are available in social sciences. The course concentrates primarily on data about elections but its approaches are useful for working with any kind of data.
Learning outcomes
At the end of the course students should be able to obtain and use data for their analysis regarding elections.
Syllabus
  • 1. Introduction to the topic, advantages and disadvantages of quantitative data, the logic of work with quantitative data, individual vs. aggregate level of analysis 2. Data formats (types of formats, opening, transformation and conversion of formats) 3. Software - MS Excel, Open Office, SPSS, R. Overview and comparison. 4. Introduction to R. 5. Where to look for data (mainly in Czech Republic)? 6. How to find data from the field of political science? 7. How to preprare data for analysis? (naming, merging, filtering, indexing of data) 8. How to transform data? (calculations, summaries and basic logical operations in Excel and R) 9. Merging data in R. 10. Selection of data in R. 11. Automatic downloading of data in R. 12. Data visualisation in R.
Literature
    required literature
  • Lyons, Pat (2012): Theory, Data and Analysis. Data Resorces for the Study of Politics in the Czech Republic. Praha: SoÚ.
  • MUNZERT, Simon, Christian RUBBA, Peter MEISSNER and Dominic NYHUIS. Automated data collection with R : a practical guide to web scraping and text mining. First published. Chichester: Wiley, 2015, xxii, 452. ISBN 9781118834817. info
    recommended literature
  • ARNOLD, Taylor and Lauren TILTON. Humanities data in R : exploring networks, geospatial data, images, and text. Cham: Springer, 2015, xiii, 211. ISBN 9783319207018. info
  • VODA, Petr. Jaká je role postkomunismu? : volební geografie České a Rakouské republiky v letech 1990-2013. 1. vydání. Brno: Centrum pro studium demokracie a kultury, 2015, 241 stran. ISBN 9788021079120. info
Teaching methods
Lectures and seminars
Assessment methods
Participation in the seminars, evaluation of intermediate taska (6 per semester), final exam.
Language of instruction
Czech
Follow-Up Courses
Further Comments
Study Materials
The course is taught annually.
The course is also listed under the following terms Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/fss/spring2024/POLn6018