Rough Draft Assignment Sheet for Politics and Policy
Rough Draft Assignment Sheet
This is where you begin to pull everything together. The rough draft should be your first attempt at writing a complete account of your semester’s research and analysis. It will have these main parts:
1. A draft abstract to start things off: 200 words summarizing the research question, the research, and the results. This should come on a separate page, with the title, your name, your tutor’s name, and your copyright declaration on it as well as the abstract itself.
2. Then, an introduction to your research topic and question that explains why your topic is important to study, lays out a hypothesis that you will test, a schools of thought section that lays out the scholarly thinking on your topic and positions your hypothesis into that thinking, and a research methods section that lays out your design and approach for the project. These are all things you have drafted before. The two keys here are to integrate your earlier work into an effective whole, and to respond usefully to the critiques your tutors made on your earlier assignment.
3. Next should be your report and analysis of your research. You should explain your cases or data thoroughly, present your analysis, and then explain the inferences you reached from your comparison. You should finish off with a conclusion, which should generalize your results, discuss problems in the analysis, suggest what effect your work has on the larger schools of thought around your topic, and suggest potential future avenues of exploration.
4. The final part of the rough draft should be your attempt to discuss the policy implications of your findings. You have a (if preliminary) empirical result. You should identify the actors interested in your particular policy, what the current policy is, and what changes (or not!) your findings would suggest for that policy. To write this, use your first blog post as a preliminary draft.
5. A solid bibliography at the end that lists your sources.
THIS IS A DRAFT. Focus on making it as complete as possible. Focus on the sections that you haven’t done already. Focus on as much analysis of the relationships between IV and DV as you can. Focus on linking your findings to the larger policy issues. Your goal is to give yourself, your tutors, and me as much as possible to work with in preparation for the final draft.
Form: 6000 word minimum, table of contents, citations, bibliography.
Style Guide is the American Political Science Association style guide, linked to here.
Due date: April 20 at 10 pm.
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