About

POLI 450A is the first course in the political science PhD methods sequence at Stanford University. The course was originally designed by Jens Hainmueller and is maintained and updated by Yiqing Xu, Department of Political Science, Stanford University. This version is from Fall 2026.

How the materials were checked

Before a lecture entered the repository, it went through a release review. The numbers on the slides were rerun from the code, the citations were checked against their sources, and independent readers went through each deck line by line, with the fixes applied.

Data

The examples use public data: U.S. election returns and Census data, the American National Election Studies, the Cooperative Election Study, V-Dem and World Bank data, the Brexit vote, and replication data from published studies. SOURCES.md lists every data file, where it comes from, and its terms.