POL 415: Political Science Junior Seminar
Syllabus updated 2016-01-29; Total Pages: 910
Prof. Alex Montgomery
(503) 517-7395
| Class |
| Office |
| Tu 6:10-8:00 |
| We 1:30-3:30 or by appointment |
| Vollum 120 |
| Vollum 241 |
| https://moodle.reed.edu/course/view.php?id=835 |
| http://alexmontgomery.com |
Course Description and Goals
Half-credit course for one semester. This course is intended for second semester juniors in political science. The course prepares students to complete the initial steps required for a year-long project: asking a research question, reviewing prior literature on the subject, and proposing a research design. Conference.
The schedule of the course mirrors closely the political science junior qualifying examination. The materials covered in this course are independent of the qual, and none of your qual work will be used to satisfy the requirements for this course. However, the tools and techniques that you will learn in this course should help you complete the qual and prepare you for your senior thesis.
The course focuses on the tools and techniques of political science research. We will review many of the major research approaches in political science. Much of the work in the class will involve reading, analyzing, and critiquing existing political science research with an eye to identifying the questions asked, methodology chosen, and how answers were reached.
Finally, each week, the department will support students who volunteer to cook for the class. Please try to keep the expenditures to approximately $50 per week.
Requirements
Class Participation
Students are required to actively participate in the class; they will have the opportunity to do so both during and outside of classroom hours. Many of the exercises will be conducted in groups inside and outside of class; some of these will involve peer review.
Readings
Readings for the course are E-Readings, which can be downloaded from the Moodle links using Zotero, which is supported by the library. Students are expected to bring a copy of the readings to class every day for reference. Laptops may be used in class, but will be banned if abused. Readings marked “Further” on the syllabus are other relevant articles or books; they are not required for class. Students who have a particular interest in the topics in question are encouraged to read these pieces and to incorporate them into their assignments.
If you are unfamiliar with JSTOR or other political science article databases, please let me know the first day of class; similarly, if you are not already using Zotero, you should start now. There is a library session for qualifiers on Tuesday of Week 4 that you will all be required to attend that can assist you with these as well.
Two developments in recent years have created a rich set of resources for the budding researcher in political science. First, a number of publishers have created “handbooks” for political science (as well as other disciplines). We draw heavily on the Oxford University Press handbook series below. These have the additional advantage of being available as electronic resources at Reed.
Useful Oxford University Press Handbooks
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Second, as an outgrowth of methodological debates in the discipline, some excellent guides to qualitative research have appeared. These are particularly valuable to Reed students since some variant of case study research is used in most theses.
Qualitative Research Guides
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Every student will be given a copy of the Political Science Department Junior Qual Handbook <http://academic.reed.edu/poli˙sci/resources/juniorqualhandbook.htm>. Pay particular attention to the more extended list of research resources that are made available in those documents.
Institutional Resources
The Interuniversity Consortium on Political and Social Research (ICPSR) <http://icpsr.umich.edu> is the worlds largest archive of social science data. There are datasets and resources applicable to almost every area of research. Even if you are not quantitatively inclined, there may be something there that could provide a numerical lens on your research question. The ICPSR runs a Summer Quantitative Research Institute in Ann Arbor, MI that may be of interest to select students.
The Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods (CQRM) <http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/programs/cqrm/> at Syracuse University is something of a counterweight to the ICPSR. There are a very rich set of resources at their website. The also run a summer research institute at Syracuse.
Course Website
Frequent use of the course website will be necessary for success in the class. Supplemental and core readings will be made available there; and assignments will be turned in electronically using the site.
Assignments
Assignments will be due weekly on Mondays at noon. Weeks in which a substantial part of the qual is due (i.e., weeks 3, 7, 10, 12) will not have additional assignments, but your submissions may be used as part of an exercise those days. Most of the assignments will be short, as they are designed to test mastery of concepts and tools rather than your ability to generate mass quantities of text.
Citation and Plagiarism
A major goal of this course is to encourage good reading, research, and citation habits. Good research requires good documentation of sources and the ability to put one’s own analysis and thoughts into a paper rather than relying on others. When in doubt as to whether you should cite something, always do it. Citations are required for ideas as well as facts, and are imperative even if you are not directly quoting authors. Make sure that you provide as specific a citation as possible; if an author discusses an idea in one section or one page, cite the specific section or page instead of the full article or book. I usually recommend that students use in-text author-date citation with full Chicago Manual of Style citations; see their Citation Quick Guide: <http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools˙citationguide.html>.
However, style is less important than the cites being present. If you use an idea or a fact without attribution, you are plagiarizing someone else’s work. Plagiarism and cheating are violations of academic integrity and thus violations of Reed’s Honor Principle. As specified by Reed’s academic conduct policy, such violations will result in disciplinary actions, including suspension or permanent dismissal from the College. Plagiarism is submitting a piece of work which in part or in whole is not entirely the student’s own work without attributing those same portions to their correct source. For examples of plagiarism and how to avoid it, see <http://www.csub.edu/ssric-trd/howto/plagiarism.htm>. If nothing else, you should avoid “sinister buttocks” syndrome. For more information on Reed’s policies see: <http://www.reed.edu/academic/gbook/comm˙pol/acad˙conduct.html>.
Plagiarism often comes as the result of a student being up against a deadline without being able to meet it. If you are having trouble meeting a deadline for whatever reason, please contact me. It is always better to ask for more time than to plagiarize. When you ask for an extension, you should a)explain what events are causing you to miss the deadline and b)request an amount of time proportional to the interfering events. You may ask for an extension up to, but not exceeding, the amount of time remaining for the assignment, except for cases of emergencies. However, since this course runs on a strict timetable and your fellow students are counting on you, in many cases extensions cannot be granted.
Accommodations
If you’d like to request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact Disability Support Services. If you have a letter from Student Services, please let me know so we can discuss those accommodations.
Interview a Reed political science professor about a current research project. Ask them the following questions, and write up a 1-2 page report based on these questions, including appropriate citations in your write up of the interview materials.
Further
The way you define your question in the long run affects the number and range of sources and the quality of the arguments you can pull together for a literature review. The choice of question can therefore be strategic. This is the first place in the assignment where your creative judgment and skill come into play.
Some questions are simply enormous (What is the literature on revolution, terrorism or Congress or John Rawls?) and there are many well-traveled paths. In these areas, the goal is to narrow the topic in a way that there is a puzzle, question, proposition or hypothesis to explore. For example, ”Is a presidential system more liable to gridlock than a parliamentary system?” may yield a variety of different positions in comparative politics. Or ”Has Hobbes really solved the ”Problem of the Fool” in the Leviathan?” Each of these questions directs your attention towards a range of different answers to this question.
A question may also be a non-starter because there is very little information on it or all the information you can find on it is of one sort (say journalistic coverage or by just one author). Here you may need to think about ways to revise your question so you can grasp a variety of research sources. Here your instructor may be able to give you good advice.
You must state in your proposal the significance of the question in Political Science. What is the existing literature you have found so far on this question? While understanding ”what views of Osama bin Laden might exist in the United States?” might be a question of interest to you, you need to explain why a Political Scientist might be interested in this question.
The scope of the literature review may depend upon how much literature already exists on the particular topic. To put it another way, given a research question such as ”Why have sanctions lasted so long against Cuba?” the appropriate literature review may study general theories of sanctions duration; in the case of a subject that has been extensively studied, a review may study the particular topic of Cuban sanctions if the theoretical positions are well staked out in order to identify remaining puzzles unexplained by the existing approaches.
Further
Choose one of the readings from the list of cases below (MacPherson, Brown, or Tronto). Using the language of and making specific reference to Tully and Rawls, provide a one page review of the article, including the core question or puzzle; the mode or approach of the theorist; and the conclusion of the author(s).
Cases
Further
Write a one-page literature review of the ODonnell, Collier and Levitsky, and Coppedge articles. This review should be organized by ideas and not by articles. Make sure you clearly define the concept or concepts as you understand them and discuss the competing definitions.
Cases
Further
Compare and contrast the approaches taken by Sagan, Ogilvie-White, and Hymans to the nuclear proliferation literature. What are the different ways in which they choose to slice the literatures (major units, level of analysis, mode of analysis, causal mechanisms, etc.)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method of organization?
Cases
All literature reviews must include an annotated bibliography. We cannot tell if you have mastered the necessary research skills merely by a list of books and articles in your bibliography. The purpose of the annotation is to assure us that you thought creatively about the resources you used, that you did not simply depend on one or two basic resources and you know how to use a full range of library resources as well as scholarly techniques.
The one constant across all bibliographies should be that you indicate how you found the sources you did. This is what we mean by an annotated bibliography. We do not mean that you have to have read everything you have and summarized it in a note on each one. The goal of the qual is to enhance your research skills, so we want to know what skills you used to compile the bibliography. We want to know you used a variety of skills to find the materials. If you want to add notes about the texts, thats fine with us, but tell us how you found the books and articles.
So, as you do your research, make sure you keep a record of how you have been gathering the information. This is what you will need for your bibliography. This includes things as simple as following footnote trails and browsing as well as using various databases and hard copy texts (the annotated bibliography of Machiavelli, the encyclopedia of the social sciences) in the reference section. With databases, we would like to know what search terms you used in conducting your searches. Source material in languages other than English should have the titles translated, and in this case it might be appropriate to add a sentence on what it is, if it is not sufficiently clear, as well as how you found it.
Label and annotate all your bibliographic entries. Specify not only where you found it but how you found it. The following sample entries on nationalism are meant to illustrate what the final bibliography ought to look like. You may find programs such as Endnote or Zotero useful for keeping track of where and how you found each item (we used Zotero to generate the sample below, using the Extra field). While we do not require that you include a summary of each piece in the notes, we highly recommend that you do, as this is a good scholarly habit to get into (in Zotero, you should add Notes for this purpose).
Read all of the sample qual research designs. In teams of 2-3, pick one of the sample research designs and make a 3-5 minute presentation in powerpoint explaining and critiquing the design. Upload a copy of the slides here and come to class prepared to present and discuss it.
Now you need to write this down in a format that that allows the reader to take in the entire state of research on this question at a glance. Outline broadly and imaginatively regarding the (re)sources at your disposal. What are the important contrasting positions? What are the overall strengths of research in this field? What are the weaknesses? What questions have gone ignored or unanswered? All this takes skill, and if it is well done, it amounts to an argument about the nature of the field or about a particular thesis worth investigating.
The outlines should be in standard Roman numeral format and be about a page and generally not more than two pages. They should demonstrate analytical thought as well as familiarity with the texts you are using. To be specific, now that you have compiled started compiling a bibliography and are reasonably familiar with the contents of them, we look to see you organizing this material in some fashion, either chronologically or by topic or by author, as is appropriate for your literature review. Some of you have already done this with your draft bibliographies, but we would like to see further refinement. Further, we hope that you’ll keep an eye out for interesting trends in the texts, or notable absences in the material - what you expected to find and didn’t or alternatively, great imbalances (a lot on something and little on something else).
In constructing your outlines, keep these elements in mind. Well executed, an outline of the available literature should suggest an argument about the way the literature has developed, the gaps in the literature, and what the literature is especially rich in.
Further
Find a paper published in a peer-reviewed political science journal that relies on a case study design. Write up what you believe would be an appropriate proposal for the research design that preceded this written work; i.e. pretend you were the author or authors presenting the research design to the political science department at Reed.
Pay close attention to the guidelines for appropriate comparative case study design in Van Evera. Be specific about separating the theory, hypotheses, case selection method, method of data collection, and style of inference.
Further
Your next task is consequently to design a draft research proposal based on your literature review. We expect the initial research designs submitted to be drafts, just as the schedule says. That is, we expect substantial improvement on them when they are resubmitted at the end of the semester, incorporating faculty comments as well as other improvements along the way. Even so, if the draft is incomplete or inadequate, we may, in some cases, ask for resubmissions.
Even though the designs are drafts at this stage, the department expects to see the following elements incorporated into the designs.
1. You should offer a clear thesis or puzzle based on the review and state its significance to political science (not just to politics). Why is this research question important (the inevitable ”who cares?” question)? This question should be plausible in light of the literature review you have just conducted. Think about the literature you have read and place your design within the framework of the literature.
2.Propose a way and methodology to test, prove, or disprove your thesis, outline the stages through which the research would proceed, and tell us what you expect to find based on the literature you have reviewed thus far. What would it take to convince you that you are wrong (identifying the truth conditions for your claim)? Whether the material is empirical or theoretical, each student must answer this question in plausible and feasible ways. Keep in mind that if you cannot answer this question, then there is no difference between what you are doing and mythology or rhetoric.
This document should be no longer than 5 pages and must have an acceptable system of citation. Your literature review should be of great assistance to you, but remember that a literature review opens the way for many research papers, not just one. If you are uncertain on how to proceed with the literature you have read, you should speak as soon as possible with your class instructor.
Though there is no expectation that the student will have the time to answer it, the strategy you propose must be feasible. This means that a student could pursue and complete the strategy you propose over the course of a year given the resources normally available to one.
This is of course not (yet at any rate) a research paper. If you did write a research paper based on the literature review, you would need to go over your review again and delete a lot of material as many of the sources you cover may not be directly related to your research design.
Cases
Take an example of a particularly awful paragraph from this class, from another class, or from your own writing and transform it into a shining example of clarity, cohesion, and emphasis using Williams’ techniques. Bonus points if the paragraph was written by a Reed professor.
By now, you have turned in your draft annotated bibliography, draft outline, and draft research design. You should also have short reviews of most of the items in your bibliography. Consequently, you should have an overall grasp of how you should organize your review. For today, turn in the introduction to your literature review, demonstrating your grasp of coherence, concision, length, elegance, and usage.
By Wednesday, turn in the EDITED introduction to your PARTNER’S literature review, demonstrating your grasp of coherence, concision, length, elegance, and usage.