Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method

Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method

In recent years, a widespread consensus has emerged about the necessity of establishing bridges between quantitative and qualitative approaches to empirical research in political science. In this article, we discuss the use of the synthetic control method as a way to bridge the quantitative/qualitative divide in comparative politics. The synthetic control method provides a systematic way to cho...

The Power of the Synthetic Control Method

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a new, popular method developed for the purpose of estimating the effect of an intervention when only one single unit has been exposed. Other similar, unexposed units are combined into a synthetic control unit intended to mimic the evolution in the exposed unit, had it not been subject to exposure. As the inference relies on only a single observational unit...

Religion and Comparative Politics

■ Abstract Although scholars tend to downplay the role of religion in political life, the vast majority of people in the world profess a strong allegiance to some spiritual faith. Secularization theory has long held that religion would become irrelevant, leading many comparative scholars to ignore this potentially significant variable. A recent resurgence in religious fundamentalism and “new re...

Comparative politics

Comparative evaluation of synthetic prosody with the PURR method

In order to evaluate the prosodic output of a speech synthesis system independently from its segmental quality, we have developed a special way to delexicalize speech stimuli which we call PURR (Prosody Unveiling through Restricted Representation). We compared the use of PURR stimuli for the evaluation of prosodic naturalness in three different test designs: magnitude estimation (ME), categoric...