Download or read book Contributions to Causal Inference for Political Science written by Jens Hainmueller and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The empirical part of the thesis presents three original empirical studies that contribute answers to previously unanswered causal questions about (a) the financial rewards to serving in Parliament (essay 3, with Andy Eggers), (b) the impact of foreign free media on the stability of authoritarian regimes (essay 4, with Holger Kern), and (c) the impact of economic concerns on public attitudes toward immigration (essay 5). The empirical essays advance the debates in these substantive fields by combining newly collected data and a design-based approach to causal inference. Design-based inference provides an effective strategy to identify valid control groups in settings where statistical control is insufficient since units potentially differ on more characteristics than can be measured and controlled for in a statistical model.