The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, presents:

Marc Bellemare (University of Minnesota)

The Paper of How: Estimating Treatment Effects Using the Front-Door Criterion

You can learn more about Marc Bellemare by clicking here.

Where and When: Thursday, January 28, at 1pm on Zoom.

RSVP: please contact Costin Ciobanu at costin.ciobanu@mail.mcgill.ca 

Abstract:We present the first application of Pearl’s (1995) front-door criterion to observational data wherein the required point-identification assumptions plausibly hold. For identification, the front-door criterion exploits exogenous mediator variables on the causal path. We estimate the effect of authorizing a shared Uber or Lyft ride on tipping by exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in whether one actually shares a ride with a stranger conditional on authorizing sharing, on fare level, and on time and place fixed effects. We find that most of the observed negative effect on tipping is driven by selection. We then explore the consequences of violating the identification
assumptions.

See more Montreal Methods Workshops events here.

The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:

7th CSDC Method Winter School

Audrey Gagnon, L’analyse de données qualitatives : l’approche des cadres*

*the workshop will be in French

When: February 1, 2021, from 1pm to 2:30pm.

Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.

About: Cet atelier propose une introduction à l’analyse des cadres (framing analysis). Mobilisée principalement dans les disciplines de la science politique, de la communication et de la sociologie, cette approche permet d’analyser la façon dont les acteurs (les élites politiques, les médias ou encore les mouvements sociaux) sont engagés dans des activités de production, de maintien et de reconstruction du sens pour leur audience, que ce soit à l’intention du grand public, de partisans, de sympathisants ou d’opposants. Analyser les cadres produits par ces acteurs permet, entre autres, d’identifier leurs intérêts, valeurs, priorités et objectifs. L’atelier vise à expliquer les fondements et les implications théoriques de l’approche des cadres, tout en soulignant ses apports et ses limites.

Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.

The CSDC, in collaboration with Université Laval and the department of economy at UQAM presents:

QPEWS (Winter 2021) – Gani Aldashev (Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management)

Organizers: Arnaud Dellis (UQAM) and Arthur Silve (ULaval)

When: Monday, February 1, 2021 at 1pm.

About The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (QPEWS) is a webinar series that will meet by Zoom on Mondays once every four weeks, from 1 pm to 1.45 pm (EST). The QPEWS will prioritize presentations by emergent scholars.

Calendar:

• February 1: Gani Aldashev (Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management)

• March 1: Hye Young You (NYU)

• March 29: Ian Turner (Yale)

• April 26: Caroline Le Pennec (HEC Montreal)

Past webinars here: QPEWS – The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (Fall 2020)

The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:

7th CSDC Method Winter School

Olivier Bergeron-Boutin, Conjoint Experiments*

*the workshop will be in English

When: February 1, 2021, from 3pm to 5pm.

Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.

About: This workshop will provide an introduction to the use of conjoint experiments in political science and present the main tools required for their implementation using Qualtrics and R. We will begin with a brief primer on the growth of conjoint experiments in recent years: why they have become popular, what they are good at estimating, and how they have been used in the literature. We will then focus on some estimation properties and assumptions that are specific to conjoint experiments and crucial to keep in mind. The third section will cover the implementation of a mock conjoint experiment in Qualtrics, a widely used survey platform. Note that this section will be a bit more technically involved, but all necessary materials will be provided. Finally, we will extract the raw data from Qualtrics and analyze it in R (some knowledge of the latter is assumed).

Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, presents:

Graeme Blair (UCLA)

Better pre-analysis plans through design declaration and diagnosis

You can learn more about Graeme Blair by clicking here.

Where and When: Thursday, February 4, at 12pm on Zoom.

RSVP: please contact Costin Ciobanu at costin.ciobanu@mail.mcgill.ca 

Abstract: Pre-analysis plans (PAPs) are used by researchers to
register a set of analyses before they learn about outcomes. PAPs
clarify which choices were made before observing outcomes and which
were made afterwards. Ironically, the set of decisions that should be
specified in a PAP is itself remarkably unclear. PAP templates and
checklists are proliferating, and the number of items they suggest
range from nine to sixty. PAPs are becoming longer and more detailed,
with some in the American Economic Association (AEA) and Evidence in
Governance and Politics (EGAP) study registries reaching hundreds of
pages, as researchers seek to be ever more comprehensive. For all
that, it is hard to assess whether these detailed plans actually
contain key analytically-relevant details. We propose an approach that
clarifies what might belong in a PAP by placing design declaration at
the core of a pre-analysis plan. In particular, we propose that PAPs
include, in addition to other details: (1) A declaration (in code) of
the features of a research design; and (2) A design diagnosis that
analyzes the properties of the design such as power, bias, or coverage
via Monte Carlo simulations.

See more Montreal Methods Workshops events here.

The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:

7th CSDC Method Winter School

Olivier Jacques, Panel data analysis*

*the workshop will be in French

When: February 9, 2021, from 1pm to 3pm.

Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.

About: The workshop will address issues in modelling time-series cross-sectional data, otherwise known as panel datasets. This type of data is very common in political science as they involve that the data has multiple temporal observations for each units of analysis (multiple individuals overserved overtime, multiple countries observed overtime, etc.). The workshop will first deal with the issue of whether the data can be “pooled”, meaning that we can ignore the fact that some observations are gathered from the same unit (country, individual). Then it will introduce the concept of random and fixed effects to control for unexplained unit-level differences in outcomes across units.

Then, the workshop will move towards dealing with stickiness overtime and the fact that the data in one year almost certainly depends on the data in the year before (autocorrelation), which is the main issue in time series analysis. This will involve giving tips to detect autocorrelation of the error term as well as fixing and modelling autocorrelation, notably with the use dynamic models with lagged dependent variables. Finally, the workshop will the deal with the issue of stationarity in the time series and show how to detect a unit root time series, as regressing two-unit root series together often involves a spurious regression. I will introduce the concept of first-differencing the data to deal with the unit root process.

Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, in collaboration with the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC), presents:

Loleen Berdahl (University of Saskatchewan)

The Resilience of Western Alienation in a Transformative Era

You can learn more about Professor Berdahl here.

Where and When: Friday, February 12, 2020 at 3pm on Zoom.

To join the event on Zoom, please click here.

Important: We inform you that our events are recorded and posted on our website and our social media. For the first part of the event, only the speaker and the CSDC membre presenting the speaker are recorded. For the questions period, all the participants might be visible on the recording. If you do not want to be recorded, you can 1) turn out your camera and use the audio only to ask a question, or 2) ask your question in the chat, and the moderator will ask the question for you.

Abstract: Why, in the evolution of the Canadian federal state, does there seem to be so much regional conflict and so little unity? In this talk, Dr. Loleen Berdahl (Universities of Saskatchewan and Regina) considers the persistence of regional conflict in Canada by examining western alienation – that is, discontent emerging from one, some, or all of Canada’s four westernmost provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Dr. Berdahl’s argument is that Canada’s national unity challenges reflect reactions to the centering of one of Canada’s many possible narratives as the dominant national narrative, creating tension with other alternative perspectives. She further argues that the study of western alienation allows us to delve into the structural features of Canadian federalism that exacerbate rather than moderate endemic regional conflict in our vast and diverse country. (Acknowledgement: Dr. Berdahl’s presentation draws upon work she is conducting with Dr. Roger Gibbins, University of Calgary (Faculty Professor and Professor Emeritus).

See all the other Speaker Series Events here.

This series is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, which is funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).

The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:

7th CSDC Method Winter School

Fernando Feitosa, Implementing a synthetic control model in R: A guide*

*the workshop will be in French

When: February 17, 2021, from 1pm to 2:30pm.

Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.

About: Difference-in-differences represent one of the most common methods for estimating causal effects. However, it is often the case that the parallel trends assumption is violated, in this way preventing a reliable estimation of causal effects through a difference-in-differences approach. Aware of this, in 2010, Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller proposed a new statistical modeling approach that allows for creating a synthetic control from portions of different control units. This synthetic control will more perfectly match the treated unit prior to the treatment than the original control units. As such, the “synthetic control” model has been used in various research, such as on the political consequences from natural disasters (Katz and Levin 2016) and compulsory voting rules (Bechtel, Hangartner, and Schmid 2018; Fowler 2013; Singh 2019). Inspired bymy own use of the “synthetic control” model (Feitosa, Blais, and Dassonneville. 2020), I will teach participants in this workshop how to easily implement a synthetic control model in R. In addition, they will leave the workshop knowing what is a “synthetic control” model and the (many) advantages and (few) disadvantages of this approach for causal analysis. No prior knowledge of this topic is expected from participants.

Proposed plan of the workshop:

• What is a synthetic control model
• Implementing a synthetic control model in R
• The advantages and disadvantages of a synthetic control model for causal analysis

Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.

The Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship is happy to presents:

7th CSDC Method Winter School

Florence Vallée-Dubois, Introduction à la visualisation de données avec R*

*the workshop will be in French

When: February 17, 2021, from 3pm to 5pm.

Registration: If you are interested in participating in one or several of the Winter School workshops, you need to register. Please register here at least 2 days before the workshop.

About: Dans cet atelier, les étudiant.e.s apprendront comment visualiser des données avec R. Nous survolerons aussi certains principes fondamentaux de la visualisation des données, incluant entre autres les limites cognitives de la perception visuelle et les problèmes causés par les illusions d’optique. Nous verrons:

• Les principes théoriques de la visualisation des données;
• Comment choisir le bon type de graphique;
• Comment lier des données à un graphique;
• Comment manipuler le format d’un graphique;
• Comment visualiser des résultats de régression.

Public cible: Les étudiant.e.s qui participent à cet atelier devraient savoir comment utiliser R (ouvrir des données dans R, connaître la syntaxe de base), mais n’ont pas besoin d’être des experts.

Full schedule and more details about each workshops of the Winter School available here.

The CSDC, in collaboration with Université Laval and the department of economy at UQAM presents:

QPEWS (Winter 2021) –  Hye Young You (NYU)

Organizers: Arnaud Dellis (UQAM) and Arthur Silve (ULaval)

When: Monday, March 1, 2021 at 1pm.

About The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (QPEWS) is a webinar series that will meet by Zoom on Mondays once every four weeks, from 1 pm to 1.45 pm (EST). The QPEWS will prioritize presentations by emergent scholars.

Calendar:

• February 1: Gani Aldashev (Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management)

• March 1: Hye Young You (NYU)

• March 29: Ian Turner (Yale)

• April 26: Caroline Le Pennec (HEC Montreal)

Past webinars here: QPEWS – The Quebec Political Economics Webinar Series (Fall 2020)