Writing political science papers (part 1)

This pamphlet will help you to recognize and to follow writing practices and standards in political science. The first step toward accomplishing this goal is to develop a basic understanding of political science and the kind of work political scientists do.

Defining Politics and Political Science

At its most basic level, politics is the struggle of "who gets what, when, how." This struggle may be as modest as competing interest groups fighting over control of a municipal budget in Small Town, U.S.A., or as overwhelming as a military stand-off between international superpowers. Political scientists study such struggles, both small and large, in an effort to develop general principles or theories about the way the world of politics works. Think about the title of your course or re-read the course description in your syllabus. You'll find that your course covers a particular sector of the large world of "politics" and brings with it a set of topics, issues, and approaches to information that may be helpful to consider as you approach a writing assignment. The diverse structure of political science reflects the diverse kinds of problems the discipline attempts to analyze and explain. In fact, political science includes at least eight major sub-fields:

• American Politics examines political behavior and institutions in the United States.
• Comparative Politics analyzes and compares political systems within and across different geographic regions.
• International Relations investigates relations among nation states and the activities of international. organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and NATO as well as international actors such as terrorists, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Multi-National Corporations (MNCs).
• Political Theory analyzes fundamental political concepts such as power and democracy and fundamental questions such as, "How should the individual and the state relate?".
• Political Methodology deals with the ways that political scientists ask and investigate political science questions.
• Public Policy examines the process by which governments make public decisions.
• Public Administration studies the ways that government polices are implemented.
• Public Law focuses on the role of law and courts in the political process.

What is Scientific about Political Science?

In order to write a good paper, it's helpful to know what constitutes good practice of political science. Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called "hard" sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important for political scientists' writing to be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. They want to build and refine ever more precise and persuasive theories. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it. Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach.

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You too may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know if presidential elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis: "When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, presidential incumbents are not reelected."

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable, or the phenomenon that is affected by other variables, would be the reelection of incumbent presidents; the independent variable, or the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable, would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent presidents and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a presidential election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

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