"ORIGIN STORY I have probably used a half a dozen or so different textbooks over the years in my Political Data Analysis course, always thinking that I had finally found the right one, only to inevitably decide that I needed to find something else. I suppose I was a bit like Goldilocks: Most books had many things to recommend them, but none were quite right. Some books had a social science orientation but not much to say about political science. Some books were overly technical, while others were not technical enough. Some books were essentially programming manuals with little to no research design or statistics instruction, while others were very good on research design or statistics but offered very little on the computing side. In the back of my mind, I figured I would eventually have to put up or shut up: I was going to have to put together my own textbook. This book started as a collection of lecture notes that I put online for my undergraduates in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in March of 2020. I had always posted a rough set of online notes for my classes, but the pandemic pivot meant that the notes had to be much more detailed and thorough than before.

This, coupled with my inability to find a textbook that was right for my class, led me to somewhat hastily cobble together my topic notes into something that started to look like a "book" during the summer of 2021. I used this new set of notes for the fall 2021 hybrid section of my undergraduate course, and it worked out pretty well. I then spent the better part of spring 2022 (a sabbatical semester) expanding and revising (and revising, and revising, and revising) the content, as well as trying to master Bookdown, so I could stitch together the multiple R Markdown files to look more like a book than just a collection of lecture notes. I wont claim to have mastered either Bookdown or Markdown, but I did learn a lot as I used them to put together the first few drafts of this book"--.