Realistic Political Problem Solvin

18–20 June 2025

Political economic models of individual or aggregate choice are typically designed for “small worlds;” settings in which there is a known, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive potential states of the world and a known, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive set of consequences for actions given a state of the world. Many of the most interesting questions in political science can be modeled in such a small world, but some can not. This unit discusses these basic elements of model building, starting from the basics of induction or deduction, and discusses the researcher’s choices over how to structure the choices they are studying and what these choices imply for research design. In the first half ouf time together we will discuss, among other things, basic model assumptions, necessary and sufficient conditions for events, intractability and uncertainty, and discrimination v optimization (as solution concepts). The second portion of the unit focuses on research design, in which we will discuss (again) necessary and sufficient conditions, compare explanation, identification, and prediction as design goals, and finally endogeneity, as-if random assignment, and instrumental variables and fixed effects estimators.

David Fortunato is Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California in San Diego.