Research Topic Statement

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Each student is required to undertake a research project on a topic of their choice, as
approved by the instructor. The project should seek to answer some empirically testable
questions about American political parties by developing a theory and hypothesis about
a causal relationship between two or more variables, and then using empirical data to
test your hypothesis. You may focus on political parties in a specific era, a comparison
between eras, their influences on specific policy areas, or any other topic related to the
course.
Assignment:
A 1-2 page statement of the research question and preliminary hypotheses and
approaches to studying the question.
Research Resources
Below is a list of websites that provide data that you may find useful for your research project.
There is a lot of data here that you can either use to study your research question, or peruse to
help come up with an empirically testable research topic. This is meant to be a starting point for
your research, NOT an exhaustive list. So I encourage to you continue looking elsewhere or
come speak to me if you are having trouble finding the data you need.
Voteview – https://voteview.com/ – This site has a wealth of data regarding voting in Congress
and member ideology, going all the way back to the First Congress.
Library of Congress – https://www.congress.gov/ – Allows you to search for all proposed bills
going back to 1973. You can see the text of the bills and any amendments, track their progress
through each chamber, and see the results of any roll call votes. Can also be cross-referenced
with the Voteview datasets.
The American Presidency Project – https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ – An archive of party
platforms and presidential media appearances throughout history, as well as a variety of other
datasets regarding presidential actions.
Pew Research Center – https://www.pewresearch.org/ – A good starting point for current and past
polling data.
American National Election Studies – https://electionstudies.org/ – Raw data for surveys
conducted during each presidential election year going back to 1948. The data sets are very large,
but they also contain a lot of questions, so there is a lot of flexibility on how you can use the data
and what questions it can be used to answer.
Cooperative Congressional Election Survey – https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/ – A large-scale annual
public survey going back to 2006.
National Council of State Legislatures – https://www.ncsl.org/ – Provides information about state
legislative activity
Official government websites like the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, FBI, etc. are
also excellent sources for official government data that can be helpful for your research. State
government websites may also be useful if you are looking for state-level data.