Research papers typically have 5-6 sections:
Introduction — In which you pose your research question/puzzle, while also providing some background to the question.
Our example will be, Why did the Democrats take over Congress in 2006?
Literature Review — In which you explain how other scholars answered the research question or similar questions.
If the research question is why did the Democrats take over Congress in 2006, then the literature review will want to review the scholarly material that has addressed this question. In addition, let us think about other things this question gets at — i.e. other questions. 1) When do congressional parties switch? 2) What generally happens in mid-term elections? What is the literature about mid-terms?
So, in writing the literature review, you might cast your net wide to explain how scholars have explained the broader phenomenon of mid-terms generally and party-shifts historically.
Research Design — In which you discuss what data you will need to answer the research question.
Let’s ask the question again: why did the Democrats take over Congress in 2006?
We want to do is develop some hypotheses … otherwise known as possible causal explanations. For now, let’s not worry at all about whether they are wrong or right. Let’s just brainstorm.
1) The economy was bad and voters wanted a different party (economic explanation)
2) The Democrats did a great job of selling themselves (advertising explanation)
3) Voters did not like the President and blamed it on Congress (voter anger explanation)
4) Voters were concerned about something that Congress was not dealing with …
Now — we have 3-4 working hypotheses. In order to answer our question, we need to go get data to TEST our hypotheses.
Data …
Let’s think about what data we need for each hypothesis:
1) For the economic explanation we will want some economic data. Let’s go to our CQ Reference Suite and find some economic data that might be useful.
Aha — I went to Vital Statistics on American Politics and see there is a chapter on Public Opinion. Within that chapter, there are some charts on Consumer Confidence and got the following graph, tracking consumer confidence, 1952-2006
We see that consumer confidence goes down in 2006, so we can at least say this is a possible cause.
2) For the Democrats did a great job selling themselves explanation. This one is a bit tougher to get easy data for. Thus, I would need to go find some articles about candidate marketing and party marketing and see if I can find some scholarly evidence of this.
3) Presidential approval ratings. Back to Vital Statistics on American Politics. I can easily find a figure about presidential job approval over time. Clearly Bush did not do too well in 2006.
4) I also want to check out what the “most important problem” was in 2006 to see what was on voter’s minds. I will go the Policy Agendas Project, to the data analysis tool and get a graph of this issue.
Although the colors are not clear, the big issue was clearly Defense, followed by Macroeconomics.
Additionally, we might want to know some history. Some good additional questions would be — what are other years in which Congress changed parties?
I can go back to Vital Statistics and download an excel spreadsheet of House Senate Election Results. Voila — the big years for party takeovers — 2006, 1994, 1946, 1930 — wow! Those are all mid-term years.
Discussion
Now I need to explain this data. I will discuss each graph and say some things about it. I will compare years, I will talk about everything.