Government 601, Fall 1998: Research Proposal Paper Assignment
Your assignment is to write a proposal for an explanatorily minded, empirical research project. The substantive focus of your project can be whatever you like, and your approach can be formal, comparative, historical, quantitative or some creative combination of these. The only restriction is that your project must aim to explain something. Mere description or interpretation won't do. You should think in terms of a project that might realistically take about a year of full-time work to complete. As part of that year, do not count time it would actually take you, in real life, to get up to speed in the relevant literature.
An initial version of the proposal is due Monday, November 16, at the beginning of class. That version of the proposal should be no more than fifteen double-spaced, typed pages in length, including all tables, figures, notes and references (a title page does not count toward the total). The final version of the proposal is due December 16. The most important difference between the initial and final versions is that the latter must present some kind of data analysis to demonstrate the basic plausibility of the main claim of the proposed research. The final version may therefore run a bit longer than the initial version, say up to about twenty pages. I intend to grade both versions of the proposal.
The tasks to be accomplished in a research proposal include clarifying the causal claims to be assessed and proving that they are theoretically interesting, describing and justifying the data to be organized and the methods of analysis, and characterizing the anticipated range and strength of the conclusions to be drawn.
Since this is a pedagogical exercise to be completed in a severely limited time period, what you need to do is much less than would be necessary in a proposal intended for actual competition or review. In particular, most of your effort for the initial version of the proposal should be devoted to research design issues. You should say what the units of analysis will be, what observations will be selected, what the main relations and variables are and how they will be measured, what inferences you plan to draw and how your data collection will allow you to do that. All of your choices should be clearly (if briefly) motivated in substantive terms, unambiguously justified according to pseudo-experimental considerations, and compared to and defended against the most compelling alternative approaches.
While you will need to engage the substantive literature bearing on your problem, and will need to do so in a thoughtful manner, extensive coverage of the substantive literature is not necessary. Indeed, if you get bogged down trying to review the literature exhaustively, you are spending your time for this assignment thinking about the wrong kinds of issues.