Guidelines for your papers, POLI 784, Spring, 2008 (Carsey)
There are several common themes I want all of you to consider as you write your papers:
Focus
Focus the paper on a process that is theoretically interesting and not a substantive area. Theories
are about why something happens, and general theories would encompass many specific
circumstances – generally many more than you are actually testing. For example, Justin’s paper
is about redistricting, but not really. More generally, his paper is about strategic decisionmaking by politicians. His theory assumes a re-election motivation for them individually, or
collectively (in terms of maximizing party control of the legislature). These two notions of what
might motivate legislators could be studied in regards to campaigning, fund raising, law making,
etc. He just chooses to study it in the specific context of redistricting. He also adds a new
wrinkle to the redistricting situation by considering the wealth of those who may or may not be
redistricted. But the paper is really about strategic politicians and his theoretical propositions are
just being tested in the context of redistricting. (NOTE: I’m using Justin’s paper as an example
here because it is a clear example and because he is quite far along on his paper. In other words,
this is a compliment to Justin and not a criticism of his work.)
Sections
You should have sections like: Introduction, Theory/Lit, Data and Methods, Results,
Conclusion. The “Theory/Lit” section should have a better title than that – something that
reflects the key theoretical issue or question in your analysis. Sometimes you might have subsections to the Theory/Lit section.
What to do in each section:
Intro: 2-3 paragraphs. The first paragraph needs to hook the reader with a clear statement of the
research question as a theoretical question presented at an abstract level. If your paper presents a
Theory A versus Theory B set-up or has more than one key theoretical issue involved, then you
can spend two paragraphs on this. The last paragraph should tell the reader again what the paper
is about, but this time in very specific and concrete terms. It says something like, “IN this paper,
I test my theory by examining redistricting for U.S. House seats in North Carolina following the
2000 Census” or something like that.
Theory/Lit: Here you flesh out the theory and the specific hypotheses you are going to test. The
existing literature is there to help you make your argument. It is not there just so you can
provide laundry list of citations and/or statements about what others found in some sort of
unrelated listing. You are NOT writing an annotated bibliography. You are presenting a theory
and deriving testable propositions/hypotheses from that theory.
Data and Methods: Nuts and bolts about the data – what countries, states, individuals, etc. are
you studying? What is the usable sample size? How is each variable being measured? What
does the statistical model (the regression equation) look like? What do your hypotheses predict
about the coefficients in that statistical model? How is the model estimated (OLS? Robust
Standard errors? etc.). You should provide a table that summarizes all of the variables (except
for things like state dummies). The table should list the variable, it’s mean, and something about
its dispersion (min/max values, Standard Deviation, something). This table should also indicate
the source(s) of the data.
Results: Here is where you report the results of your analysis, present the tables, etc. Be
complete. Work through some hypothetical examples -- if a one-unit increase in X causes a B1
change in Y, find some way to communicate that to readers in a meaningful way. Use the
metrics of the variables. So, instead of saying when X goes up by 1, Y goes up by B1, say when
income goes up by $10,000, my dependent variable (whatever it is) changes by whatever amount
it changes expressed in the units of that variable. Really unpack the results.
You can also talk about diagnostics and alternative specifications for the model you considered
in this section.
Conclusions: What are the implications of your findings for your theory and for the substantive
topic at hand? In other words, what did we learn about redistricting, and what did we learn about
strategic politicians more generally? Do your results support your theory? Do your results
suggest a reworking of the theory?
Tables and Figures
Tables and Figures showing results should stand along. They need a title that is informative.
For tables, you need to report coefficients and either standard errors, t-scores, or p-values. You
can add stars as well. You should report R-2, Adjusted R-2, the Model F-test, and the Sample
size. You should note the source of the data. You should say that the table entries are OLS
coefficients and their standard errors (or whatever – be sure to note if they are robust standard
errors, if there are corrections for serial correlation, etc.). Most would report that you estimated
the results using R version 2.60 or STATA SE version 9.2 or whatever. In short, a reader should
be able to just look at a table and have a pretty good idea what’s going on without reading any of
the body of the paper. For figures, you need a title, a similar note (Figure 1 derived from OLS
estimated reported in Table 2, etc.), and clear labels on the x-axis, the y-axis, and the contents of
the figure.
My summary recommendation/advice
Write and re-write focusing on clarity. In particular, make sure the links from theory to
hypotheses to statistical model and tests and back to hypotheses and theory are as clear as they
can be. Model your paper after the best papers you’ve read in top journals in your field