Summer School for Women in Political Methodology: Day 1
Updated August 11, 2025
Hi SSWPM participants,
It was great to meet you all! Here you can find all of the course materials for the short courses on Functional Programming in R
and Introduction to Python for R
Users that took place on July 21, 2025.
Preparation for both courses: Please have a short R
data analysis script and/or structured data from your own work on hand. If we have time leftover after going through applied examples, we will use them to practice functional programming and Python “in the wild”.
Functional Programming in R
Course preparation
This course was designed for participants with some baseline knowledge of R/RStudio and data management. If you would like a refresher on either of these things, feel free to peruse the following materials.
Please note that some of the information related to IDEs/the tidyverse may be a bit outdated.
Course materials
- Slides
- Handout [HTML] [PDF]
- Handout with answers [HTML] [PDF]
- R Project Folder
- GitHub repository
Introduction to Python for R
users
Course preparation
We will be using Google Colab for this course. You don’t need to do anything to set this up outside of having a Google account.
For applied examples with data, we will be using the Parties’ Immigration and Integration Positions Dataset (PImPo) (Lehmann and Zobel 2018). Please download the PImPo Party-Level DS CSV file from here: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/information/documents/pimpo.
We will review how to load the dataset into Google Colab from your local files during the course.
Course materials
References
Lehmann, P., & Zobel, M. (2018). Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding. European Journal of Political Research, 57(4), 1056-1083. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12295