Research design paper

You will identify an important topic in political science of your choice, formulate a research question, identify a hypothesis (or set of hypotheses), and create a research design that tests your hypotheses. It can up be to 6 pages long with double-spaced paragraphs, have 12-pt font, and use standard 1-inch margins.

You may pick any topic within the bounds of political science. The most important aspect of choosing a paper question is that the topic be testable using data or methods that can be acquired and implemented.

The research question should have NO OPINIONS IN IT! I’ll provide notes from lecture. Come up with research question yourself

The paper will consist of the following labeled sections:
I. Introduction/Research Question – This section sets up the paper. What is the question you are seeking to answer? Briefly offer up to two paragraphs explaining why the question is relevant from a scholarly perspective. This can be because research on this topic has left some questions (like the one you are pursuing) unanswered or because you thought about a new way to methodologically address the question you are pursuing.
Here is a listing of some broader ideas for paper topics that students have looked at in the past:

– How does <gender, race, age, pet ownership, income, education, etc.> affect <voting, turnout, etc.> in <presidential elections, congressional elections, state judicial elections, political primaries, etc.> in Country X?

– How does <term limits for elected officials, the line-item veto, campaign finance reform, the length of a member’s term, negative campaign advertising> affect <a representatives’ voting, spending in congress/a state, the likelihood a member gets reelected>?

– How does <age, gender, the mode of selection> impact voting in <the United
States Court of Appeals, trial courts, the United States Supreme Court, European Supreme Courts, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the British House of Commons>?

– What factors influence <members of Congress, State representatives, governors, members of Parliament> decision to <retire, seek higher office>?
You should browse the political science literature to help formulate your question. Stronger research design papers will pose questions that can make a valuable contribution to literature on the topic. A valuable contribution, as implied in the previous paragraph, would answer a question that previous research on the topic has not yet addressed or offer a new way of testing an important question in political science.
In the two paragraphs explaining what your question is and what it is important (why the question makes a valuable contribution), cite literature that you stimulated your interest in your particular question (briefly). For example, an article may show that watching “softer” news programs can help voters learn about presidential candidates, but they only focus on how much they know about the candidate in general. You propose a question that builds upon this previous work by testing whether softer news programs help voters lean about the candidates’ policies or about their character. You would concisely explain this in the two paragraphs and cite the previous work. If you base your question on perhaps two or three previous articles, then you cite them all.
An invaluable resource to identify these papers can be found at www.jstor.org or through usage of Google Scholar. Students looking for accessible political science research may also consider consulting articles discussed on the monkey cage at www.themonkeycage.org.The blog itself is not a source; however, the articles they discuss are often good sources for crafting research questions.
Wikipedia is open-source material and NOT appropriate for this paper. Any paper citing it will receive a zero.

II. Hypotheses and Their Theoretical Foundation – This section should be about one page and should articulate and explain your hypothesis or set of hypotheses. It istypically the most difficult section for students to compose.
Research designs, your plan for testing your hypotheses and ultimately answering your research question, are based on the content of your hypotheses. Hypotheses articulate simplified relationships between independent and dependent variables. They are directional in nature, saying that a change in X leads to a change in Y. You may predict that an increase in X leads to an increase in Y or an increase in X leads to a decrease in Y, and so on.

A hypothesis or a pair of related hypotheses do not make much sense without some theoretical explanation of the relationship between the two variables offered in the hypotheses. On this page, you should offer a theoretical justification of your hypotheses.
An example of a theoretical justification for your hypotheses would look like this:
In a recent book, Post-Broadcast Democracy (2007), Markus Prior posits that the introduction of cable television made the average American less political knowledgeable. Once they got access to cable television and the many entertaining alternatives they provided to the broadcast networks, many Americans quit watchingthe news because cable television gave them opportunities to watch other programming. Data show that most Americans would prefer watching entertainment instead of the news. This implies that the introduction of cable television made the average American less politically knowledgeable.

You would go on to write:
For example, you might “Getting access to cable television made the average
American less knowledgeable about politics.” This statement is a specific version of a change in X leads to a decrease in Y. Getting access to cable is the change in X, leading
to a decrease in how much people know about national politics (the decrease in Y).
III. Research Design- Once you have made your hypothesis (or hypotheses) clear, you should begin thinking about how you will test it (them). Will you conduct an experiment? Will you conduct a “controlled” study where one group gets a “treatment” (like cable television in the example above) and another group does not and you measure the differences between the groups on some variable before and after the treatment?
You should also identify what your variables are. What is the dependent variable, the
Independent variable, the “control” variables that account for other factors we know
That will influence the dependent variable.

Finally, identify your data sources. Will you collect them on your own or will you compile publicly available data (like public opinion surveys conducted by major polling organizations or federal, state, or local records)
You do not need to specify or include a working statistical model — and one is not expected for this paper.