In this paper you must adequately and appropriately utilize at least 20 empirical and peer-reviewed
sources, but preferably more (books from an academic/university press are also acceptable for this
requirement). Write a paper that surveys the academic literature that answers your question, and
discusses whether there is a satisfactory answer to your question. Does the literature fully answer
your question?
Keys to this assignment: you must discuss every article you cite in reference to your research
question. You must also organize the literature review by describing how and why you have ordered
your review of the literature in the way that you have. In other words, explain why you have chosen
to talk about the articles in the order you do, and how the articles fully or partially answer your
question.
The goal for this paper is to organize and explain to the reader what we (political scientists) know
about your topic, and what we don’t know. This section is not a laundry list of articles/books. You
need to think about what other people have said about the topic, and organize their knowledge into a
coherent understanding of the general topic.
You also need to tell a story. For example, your paper might flow like this: political science started
with “Point A”, with a set of beliefs about this topic, then a group of authors tested a few things,
which led the field to “Point B”, where some other political scientists disagreed with them, and they
argued the field should be at “Point C”, but they were shown to be incorrect, so the field ended up
back up in “Point D”, until this most recent group of authors showed evidence that everyone was
incorrect, which is why political science ended up in “Point E”, which is where we are today.
Essentially, it is a story of how we know what we do about your topic and where it fits into the
political science literature.
(HINT: if you are confused about how create a story, organize your bibliography/lit reviews by date
the article/book was published. Then look them over/re-read them, and see if you can see how the
field moved from one point of view to another.)
A critical component of your “story” is indicating where other authors have missed/gone
wrong/forgotten something. You are attempting to answer the original question (which motivated
this literature review). One of the possible answers to your question is “we don’t know,” which
means that the research done to this point hasn’t given a definitive answer to your question.
HOWEVER: you will need to point out the flaws in the articles to show how they are failing to give a
complete answer. As you have seen, other authors are not perfect (nothing is), so feel free to point out
where they have gone wrong.
Regarding format, there are no specific sections to this paper, though you may want to divide the
literature review itself into sections based on the way you are organizing the literature you are
reviewing. If it looks to you like the literature on your topic has three separate points of view, then
make three sections out of it. Given this is an essay, you will also need an introduction and
conclusion. The introduction should give a basic overview of your literature review (“There are two
basic points of view on this topic: A and B, and I’ll review each…”), while your conclusion should
review the degree to which the overall set of articles/books answers your original question. If your
literature review is missing that, you will need to add it before submission.
AT ALL TIMES: remember that you have read the material, and your readers have not. Don’t
assume they know anything beyond what an average person would know about this topic. You
know the literature, and this section is when you play “teacher” and inform everyone else what is
important (and what is not) about a subject they should find interesting.
Things to keep in mind:
1. You must clearly state how you are organizing the sources you discuss, and why that organization
is best for the theme/thesis you are trying to show. In other words, you must explicitly have a
narrative about how your entire paper is organized; explain why you have chosen to discuss the
articles in the order that you are.
2. You will need to discuss some of the methodological issues (operationalization, statistics, numbers,
etc.) in the articles. You are free to say good things about them, or bad things if it is pertinent. It
doesn’t matter; the point is you need to integrate some of the concepts we learned in the course into
the literature review. Thus, you will need to explicitly discuss the political science aspects of some
(not all) of the articles you are using.
3. The paper will need to be fully edited. I do not grade explicitly on grammar/syntax, but if I cannot
understand your sentence, I will have trouble grading it.
Length: Paper length should be between 15 and 25 pages. However, it is important to note that
quality of your paper matters more than quantity of pages. It would be very difficult to complete this
project satisfactorily using less than 15 pages. Subsequently, papers that are beyond 25 pages are not
required, and would likely contain unneeded material.
Style: Papers must be typed and double-spaced. The paper must include page numbers. All margins
should be one inch. Do not use a font larger than 12 point, and please use a professional serif font (no
“Comic Sans” or “Ultra Bold” type fonts). I suggest using “Book Antiqua,” “Goudy Old Style,”
“Georgia,” “Times New Roman,” or “Century.” Please do not alter the font size of your punctuation,
the size of the margins, or use any other tricks to make your paper seem longer than it really is. I will
check for these things; I was in your shoes not too long ago, and I know most of the tricks.
You must use an “official” style when writing this paper (APSA, Chicago, or APA). I do require
that you are consistent throughout the paper.
Extra Credit Instructions:
You can earn up to
25 points on this paper by submitting to me a research design for a project
that would test your theory using an empirical analysis. Stylistically, I am less interested in the
formatting of this section, and more interested in how you can apply some of the concepts that we
used in the course to create your own research topic. I do not expect you to know, or even fully
understand which empirical analysis or tests would be appropriate to conduct that actual analysis. I
am simply looking for how you would operationalize your own research into an empirical study.
How would you take your concepts and turn them into variables? What would those variables
measure? Where would you collect your data from? Would that data be limited in any way? Would
your measure be valid? Is it reliable? What limitations would your data and study face? What would
one case be? Points will be assigned based on your ability to apply the concepts you learned in class
to your own research.
Utilize the sources I already have within my critiical synthesis, which is attached below.
