Guidelines for Research Paper

PS 681, American Political Behavior

Professor Mark Peffley

The purpose of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to explore a topic of your choice in greater depth, and to develop an empirical research paper that could be presented at a political science conference and result in a journal submission or develop into a dissertation topic. I’ll provide you with a couple of additional guidelines for writing journal articles that we will discuss in class. The hope is that you’ll receive training in research writing by the end of the semester.

• The paper is due the last week of class, when students will make brief PowerPoint presentations.
• Your paper proposal is due January 31^st. Write a brief, two-page, typed proposal that clearly describes the purpose, its contribution and outlines the topic in as much detail as possible so that I can provide you with useful feedback before you start writing.
• Before January 31, arrange a meeting with me to discuss your topic. Prior to our meeting, email me a brief, rough outline of potential research questions, some of the relevant literature, why you’re interested in the topic, how the topic fits with the course, and so on.
• For your proposal and final paper, you might want to follow the suggested outline below:

1) Introduction

a) Thesis: What is the central research question that you are investigating? Some statement like, “The primary purpose of this paper is to...” (Or, the purpose of this paper is twofold…). Or begin with your question, “How do terrorist attacks influence public support for civil liberties?” The thesis of the research should be stated early in the paper—the first few paragraphs, the first page or two.

b) Include in your introduction a brief statement describing the importance of the topic and the thesis. What is new here? What are the political, theoretical, and normative implications of your research? How does your research improve upon the existing literature? What contribution will the proposed research make to the literature? What new, exciting directions will you take the literature? Like a journalist, you need to convince the reader that the paper is worthy of careful consideration.

c) Be sure to discuss the political implications of your research.

d) Plan of the paper: In a brief paragraph, give an overview of your arguments and how the paper will be organized. This should be short.

e) Think about the Reader when writing your paper. You must convince the Reader (me or anonymous reviewers) in the first few pages to keep reading. You need to engage the Reader, tell her what your research is about, convince her of the importance of your study and its contribution to the literature. The Reader is busy and has volunteered a few hours of their day to read your study. Don’t make them do all the work!

2) Past Research (review of the literature). Please be especially vigilant about keeping the review relevant to the central thesis of the paper, which should be the central organizing theme of your paper. I don’t want a bibliographic essay, but an evaluation of relevant prior research on the topic that will describe how you intend to improve on existing studies.

a) Strengths and weaknesses of prior research (see page 1 of the syllabus for ideas here); you might discuss one or more of the following:

i) How existing research has overlooked or given inadequate attention to your topic, for whatever reason.

ii) You might critique existing studies on a number of grounds, including inadequate measures, inappropriate design, fuzzy concepts, lack of theory, contradictory findings, puzzles in the literature that need to be solved, and so on. You’re obviously going to focus on those problems that you intend to correct in your research.

b) Describe briefly how you propose to correct the above problems.

c) Don’t call it a “Literature Review” and don’t say you are filling a gap in the literature.

3) Expectations: What do you expect to find? What are your expectations? Your expectations or hypotheses will flow from theory and prior research.

4) Design, Measures, Data: The actual design of your proposed research. What basic decisions are you making about your research design and how do you justify them?

a) What general type of research design is most appropriate for your study? Survey research, field research, panel design, time-series, experimental, or some other way of collecting observations?

b) Define important concepts and describe how you plan to operationalize (measure) important variables.

c) What type of observations, at what level of analysis, how they should be made, and so forth?

5) Conclusions: Reflect back on your thesis and the contribution of your proposed research.

It’s that simple! Something else you might do is take a close look at an article you really like and see how the authors introduce the topic, make transitions, and all the other things listed above. Use that article as a template to organize and write your paper. Imitation is an important form of learning!