PSCI 4718: Honors Thesis in Political Science

Fall 2006/Spring 2007

Fall Written Assignment Guidelines

During the fall semester, you will proceed with your honors theses through a series of stages, weighted and due as indicated below:

Element	Grade%	Date Due
Thesis Topic	10%	20061002
Lit Review	20%	20061030
Paper Draft	50%	20061211

The aim of proceeding in this way is to keep you “on task” and, especially, to permit you, your advisor and our class to identify helpful “course corrections”.

Thesis Topic

Your paper topic reflects your initial characterization of the thesis. In 1-2 pages (not more!), you must identity and introduce the question that you will be addressing in the thesis; briefly identify the relevant literatures (e.g., at a broad level of generality such as “theories of social capital”); identify the hypotheses that you will test; provide the broad contours of your research design; and discuss implications of your findings for our understandings of the question in play and institutional theory more generally.

Literature Review

As we have discussed, science is conventionally viewed as a transparent and progressive process, wherein, among other things, given work occurs against the backdrop of work already done. The literature review is your identification and analysis of the scientific backdrop for your own research. You must be thorough and creative in identifying existing work. You must analyze and organize it so that it “sets up” what you aim to do. In other words, your own research should depart from some knowledge frontier, and that knowledge frontier must be explicitly identified.

I imagine that a revised version of this literature review will find its way into your first draft and eventually into your final thesis. So be as thorough as you can be now, “up front”. It will not only help guide you (e.g., by helping you to identify questions that need answering or rival theories that need addressing), but it will save you work later on. Existing literature should be organized logically or analytically, not merely chronologically or categorically. Again, it should be organized so as to “set up” your own research. See Carlson & Hyde, ch. 5, for more on how to put together a review of the literature.

Thesis Draft

Your draft will be a substantially complete initial version of your thesis. Minimally it should contain a full introduction, a full literature review, a clear research design, and full specification and operationalization of your hypotheses, and initial discussion of data/results and implications. The more you can get done at this stage, the better off you will be as you get down to “brass tacks” throughout the spring semester.

Here are some of the nuts and bolts. Failure to respect these requirements will result in point deductions.

• Your draft must have a title page which provides a descriptive title (something other than “draft honors thesis”) and your name.
• Draft theses must be double-spaced, in 12-point font, with normal margins, paginated, and spell-checked.
• Do not bind the drafts other than with a staple at the top-left corner.

The draft thesis must contain the following elements, organized as you see fit.

• An introductory section comprised of four elements: 1) mood music (introducing the topic, identifying your main question); 2) thesis/argument; 3) plan/outline; 4) implications. This should be relatively brief, certainly not more than a few pages.
• A literature review, in which you present an organized survey of the knowledge frontier with respect to the issue that you examine. This should “set up” your own research insofar as it will form a response to or departure from the existing literature.
• A theoretical section in which you state your arguments and derive testable hypotheses.
• A research design section in which you identify and justify the evidence and methods that you will use.
• An empirical section in which you present, analyze and interpret your evidence.
• A concluding section in which you summarize your arguments and findings and draw out the broader implications of your research.