What other sciences look like

Josep M. Colomer

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: In order to have references for discussing mathematical menus in political science, I review the most common types of mathematical formulae used in physics and chemistry, as well as some mathematical advances in economics. Several issues appear relevant: variables should be well defined and measurable; the relationships between variables may be non-linear; the direction of causality should be clearly identified and not assumed on a priori grounds. On these bases, theoretically-driven equations on political matters can be validated by empirical tests and can predict observable phenomena.

Keywords: Natural and social sciences; econometrics; political science methods; mathematical models; regression analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C00 C01 C02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1017.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).