Term paper 2

Published

December 15, 2024

Overview

Your final term paper for this course is a chance for you to explore a topic of interest to you.

Rather than a traditional paper format, I would like you to structure this assignment as an “explainer” providing us with 5 things we need to know about a topic of your choosing.

Each point should be roughly 1 to 2 pages double spaced. So your final paper may be 5-10 pages (max).

At a minimum, you must reference at least 3 academic articles. They can be articles from the syllabus, your response papers, or additional research. You will likely want to cite more. You may cite articles parenthetically, with footnotes, or using hyperlinks (As you might see in an actual explainer)

What you explain and how you explain it are up to you, but I would suggest something like the following:

  1. Introduce the topic:
  2. Lay out key theories and topics
  3. Present a major debate that interests you
  4. Discuss revisions or extensions to that debate
  5. Offer a direction for future research

So for example, say you’re interested in partisanship? You might structure your explainer in terms of questions or claims like:

  • What is partisanship?
    • Provide a definition of partisanship and preview the points you’ll make below. If there was one or two things that people had to know about partisanship what would it be?
  • Why does partisanship matter?
    • Provide an overview of all the different things partisanship is thought to explain or influence
    • Perhaps introduce a debate (partisanship as a running tally vs social identity) that you will discuss below
  • Partisanship is a heuristic for voters
    • Dive into the research on partisanship as a heuristic or cue
    • Focus on a single paper, or summarize a set of papers
  • Partisanship is a social identity
    • Discuss alternative conception of partisanship as
  • Partisanship bleeds into our personal lives
    • Summarize literature on affective polarization
    • Propose a research design for studying affective polarization

Again, the format is up to you. Imagine your parents were reading this with their morning coffee. What concepts and theories would you want them to know. What questions would you want them to ask?

Grading

In terms of grading:

  • An “A” explainer is well-written, discusses more than three articles and make points that relate to each other.
  • A “B” explainer is, well, written, discusses three articles and make loosely related points on the topic.
  • A “C” explainer does none of this.

Examples

Below are two examples of final papers:

Footnotes

  1. You are free to use this specific example if you want, but I think you can probably come up with something better↩︎