Pol 143 Research paper guidelines
Comparing two countries:
There are 2 options here: A) Pick a puzzle for your paper
that concerns a difference between two countries. You might identify a pair of
countries that have experienced a similar outcome (effect) despite otherwise
mostly dissimilar characteristics (causes or controls), and try to explain why
the two countries experienced the similar outcome.
B) Or you might identify a pair of countries that have
experienced a different outcome despite otherwise mostly similar
characteristics, and try to explain why the two countries experienced the
different outcome.
Your research paper should have five parts: an
introduction, a contextual section, a literature review, an analysis, and a
conclusion. To wit:
Your introduction
should state your problem clearly in the first sentence, briefly describe
your overall conclusion, and outline the structure of your argument. It’s
also helpful to suggest why your topic should interest readers.
Your contextual section
should flesh out your question by defining the terms of your question and
describing the facts that you mean to explain. You should not draw any
conclusions in this section.
Your literature review
should relate how other scholars have explained the facts that you just
described in the contextual section. You should not criticize or analyze
their views in this section.
Your analysis should
advance your own argument based on the facts. You should begin by
explicitly addressing the views of other scholars that you’ve described in
the literature review. You should build your own argument on the pros and
cons that you find in others’ arguments.
Your conclusion should
restate your question and briefly summarize the logic of your analysis. If
you would like to offer suggestions for further work or other flowery
thoughts, this is the place.
Paper introduction and context:
Your paper’s introduction and context should indicate
what puzzle you will address and make the terms of your question and their
context clear. You should let readers know why your topic is important, and you
should outline the rest of your paper. You should avoid answers to your
question and explanation of causes (though these should appear in summary form
in the outline in this part of your final paper). I will grade this assignment
according to the quality of your statement of your central puzzle, the quality
of the selection and presentation of facts that you offer to make the context
of your puzzle clear, and the coherence with which you establish a clear thesis
and make each part of your paper make sense in terms of that thesis. You should
write it as a coherent paper, not a set of bullet points. Your introduction and
context should be about 3 pages; much shorter and you’ll have left something
out; much longer and you’re probably trying to answer your question as well as
ask it.
Rewrite of Introduction and Context and Literature
review:
Your literature review should describe how other scholars
have answered your question as well as how they’ve critiqued each other’s
answers. The goal is to describe the most important answers out there in the
scholarly conversation about your question, as well as to trace the development
of the conversation if you can. For each source that you review, you should
describe its conclusion (what causes the effect), its reasoning (how the cause
causes the effect), and its evidence (how the author knows she’s right). It can
make the shape of the scholarly conversation clearer to your audience if you
group scholars who take a similar approach to your question. It’s also helpful
to readers to offer a summary of the perspectives about your question before
and after the paragraphs in which you describe the sources in detail to help
your readers know what you want them to retain. I will grade the literature
review according to the quality and representativeness of your sources and the
quality of your descriptions of their conclusions, reasoning, and evidence.
Your paper should be up to about 3 pages at this point; much shorter and you’ll
probably have left out relevant literature; much longer and you may be getting
carried away with the sources or have moved on prematurely to critiquing them.
Analysis and Conclusion:
You should start your analysis by explaining what
distinguishes the perspectives you described in your literature review from one
another (e.g. different causes, different reasoning, different evidence). You
should then make a case as to which perspective (or combination thereof, or a
new one of your own) comes closest to the truth as you see it (by, e.g.,
describing new evidence, reinterpreting evidence, describing a missed mechanism
or cause). I will grade the paper according to the quality of your discussion
of how your problem has been and/or might be explained by scholars from
different perspectives, the quality of your analysis of what fundamentally
unites and distinguishes the competing perspectives that you address, and the
coherence with which you establish a clear thesis and make each part of your
paper make sense in terms of that thesis. About 3-4 pages in length
