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2 - Approaches

from Part I - Framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2020

John Gerring
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Wouter Veenendaal
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
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Summary

In Chapter 2, we review prior work on scale, discuss obstacles to reaching inferences about the causal role of scale, and lay out our own approach to this difficult question. After surveying extent work on community size and related subjects, we discuss the concept of a political community, which may be of several sorts and of any size. In the third section, we lay out the measurement of community scale, explaining that we transform population from a linear measure into a logarithmic measure. In the fourth section, we consider the difficulty of treating scale as a causal factor. This is a complicated issue, given that the population of political communities is a slow-moving cause, not directly manipulable, and rarely subject to as-if random perturbations. As such, it falls far from the gold standard of experimental research designs. The fifth section lays out the modeling strategies employed in quantitative analyses to follow. The sixth section discusses various outcomes of theoretical interest, and the final section introduces the data sources that we rely on to measure right- and left-side variables.

Type
Chapter
Information
Population and Politics
The Impact of Scale
, pp. 24 - 62
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Approaches
  • John Gerring, University of Texas, Austin, Wouter Veenendaal, Universiteit Leiden
  • Book: Population and Politics
  • Online publication: 14 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108657099.003
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  • Approaches
  • John Gerring, University of Texas, Austin, Wouter Veenendaal, Universiteit Leiden
  • Book: Population and Politics
  • Online publication: 14 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108657099.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Approaches
  • John Gerring, University of Texas, Austin, Wouter Veenendaal, Universiteit Leiden
  • Book: Population and Politics
  • Online publication: 14 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108657099.003
Available formats
×