Before writing a research paper for a seminar in political science, you should always develop your research design. In this seminar, you only have to write the design, not the actual research paper. The research design is a plan for your research. It is written for two audiences:
1) yourself: it provides you as a researcher with a transparent plan to follow throughout the research process;
2) other scholars/students of political science: it allows your peers and me as your instructor to give you feedback, always most helpful at an early stage;
Keeping these two audiences and functions in mind is useful when preparing your research design (as in general, it is useful to think about the audience you are writing for, no matter what you are writing).
A research design addresses all components of the research process we have already been discussing and which you have been extracting from the articles you present in class week by week.
Research question
Ideally, a question is a phrase that ends with a question mark, do not beat around the bush with cryptical phrases covering up what you actually want to do. In empirical papers, there are “how?” and “why/what causes?” questions. Explain why the research question is relevant, and why we would care about the answer, both as the wider public and as academic political scientists.
Theory provides tentative answers to the research question. Explanatory (as opposed to normative) theories consist of concepts and hypotheses that establish relationships between causes and an outcome (qualitative terminology), respectively independent and dependent variables (quantitative terminology). Start from the theories and research questions and try to think of possible empirical designs related to one of the theories.
Conceptualisation
The process of defining the concepts you are using in your research. You can either draw on an established definition, or come up with your own. The important thing is that you are transparent about what your key concepts mean (e.g. “I define an ethnics commission’s autonomy as having freedom from political interference”).
Operationalisation
Translating concepts into things that can be observed in the real world (e.g. answers of agency members to a survey question about agency’s freedom from political interference)
Case selection
Choose a case / cases that allow answering the research question and justify them from the perspective of general theory applying to more than just your case(s) and having in mind the universe of cases (the broader set of similar phenomena). Remember that we do not just want to understand individual cases, but contribute to improving general theories.
Data collection
State how you plan to gather your data: e.g. compiling datasets (surveys, electoral results), original documents (politicians’ speeches, transcripts of parliamentary sessions), conducting interviews, …. (here
you discuss ideas on where you would find the data you need for your study, since you are not actually going to undertake this step)
Analysis & Results
Using qualitative and/or quantitative methods (please justify why you would use which method(s) of analysis in your research project). Describe your results.
Inference
Answering the research question on the basis of empirical evidence.
Discussion.
Discuss how your results relate to the current state of the art (are they in line with previous study? Are they pointing to the opposite direction? Are your hypothesis confirmed? If not, what are the possible reasons?). Highlight the main shortcomings and possible / future improvements (there are always shortcoming,!).
