This course provides an introduction to current empirical research in political science with a focus on methods for causal inference. The weekly lectures will present the techniques and illustrate their applications by making extensive use of the most up-to-date empirical literature. The tutorials will give feedback on formative work, will provide an opportunity to learn how to apply the methods with the statistical software Stata and will provide supervision on a group research project which will be assigned in week 2. After reviewing the rationale for simple OLS estimation, particularly focussing on the conditions for a causal interpretation of the coefficients, the course will cover instrumental variables, panel data, differences-in-differences, regression discontinuity and several applications to political science. Students will be stimulated to think in experimental terms and the main theme will be how to replicate or get close to the experimental ideal of natural sciences by using non-experimental observational data.