The Importance of Writing in Political Science
by Dr. Christian Leuprecht, Department of Political Science

Political science places a strong premium on written communication. In fact, political scientists wrote some of the world’s greatest books and documents. In his Politics, for example, Aristotle examined the nature of the polis and "the good life." Many centuries later, the authors of The Federalist (Madison, Hamilton, Jay) applied their studies of past political regimes to the immediate problem of designing a large-scale democratic republic.

As a student in Public and International Affairs, you must not only comprehend the writing of others, but be able to effectively communicate your ideas in writing as well. Most of your professors will assign one or more types of writing in their classes. While there is considerable variation in the types of writing you will do, you should always aim to be clear, precise and organized. This is not as easy as it sounds. All writers must work at their craft, and even good writers produce several drafts of their writing before others see it. The sooner you accept this, the better.

Thinking as a Political Scientist

In order to write a good political science paper, it's helpful to know what constitutes good practice of political science. Although political scientists are prone to debate and disagreement, the majority view the discipline as a genuine science. As a result, political scientists generally strive to emulate the objectivity as well as the conceptual and methodological rigor typically associated with the so-called "hard" sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and physics). They see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works. Given these aims, it is important that writing in political science be conceptually precise, free from bias, and well-substantiated by empirical evidence. Political scientists want to build and refine ever more precise and persuasive theories. Knowing that political scientists value objectivity may help you in making decisions about how to write your paper and what to put in it. (Political theory is an important exception to this empirical approach.)

Since theory-building serves as the cornerstone of the discipline, it may be useful to see how it works. You too may be wrestling with theories or proposing your own as you write your paper. Consider how political scientists have arrived at the theories you are reading and discussing in your course. Most political scientists adhere to a simple model of scientific inquiry when building theories. The key to building precise and persuasive theories is to develop and test hypotheses. Hypotheses are statements that researchers construct for the purpose of testing whether or not a certain relationship exists between two phenomena. To see how political scientists use hypotheses, and to imagine how you might use a hypothesis to develop a thesis for your paper, consider the following example. Suppose that we want to know if general elections are affected by economic conditions. We could formulate this question into the following hypothesis: "When the national unemployment rate is greater than 7 percent at the time of the election, Prime ministerial incumbents are not reelected."

In the research model designed to test this hypothesis, the dependent variable, or the phenomenon that is affected by other variables, would be the reelection of incumbent Prime Ministers; the independent variable, or the phenomenon that may have some effect on the dependent variable, would be the national unemployment rate. You could test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables by collecting data on unemployment rates and the reelection of incumbent Prime Ministers and comparing the two sets of information. If you found that in every instance that the national unemployment rate was greater than 7 percent at the time of a general election the incumbent lost, you would have significant support for our hypothesis.

However, research in political science seldom yields immediately conclusive results. In this case, for example, although in most recent general elections our hypothesis holds true, a prime minister may have been reelected despite the fact that the national unemployment rate was higher than 7%. To explain this important exception and to make certain that other factors besides high unemployment rates were not primarily responsible for the defeat of incumbent prime ministers in other election years, you would need to do further research. So, you can see how political scientists use the scientific method to build ever more precise and persuasive theories and how you might begin to think about and analyze the topics that interest you as your write your paper.

Writing as a Political Scientist

Since political scientists construct and assess theories in accordance with the principles of the scientific method, writing in the field conveys the rigor, objectivity, and logical consistency that characterize this method. Thus, in contrast to scholars in such fields as literature, art history or classics, political scientists avoid the use of impressionistic or metaphorical language, or language which appeals primarily to our senses, emotions, or moral beliefs. In other words, rather than persuade you with the elegance of their prose or the moral virtue of their beliefs, political scientists persuade through their command of the evidence and their ability to relate the evidence to theories that can withstand the test of empirical investigation. In writing of this sort, clarity and concision are at a premium. To achieve such clarity and concision, political scientists precisely define any terms or concepts that are important to the arguments that they make. This precision often requires that they "operationalize" key terms or concepts, which simply means that they define them so that they can be measured or tested through scientific investigation.

Fortunately, you will generally not be expected to devise or operationalize key concepts entirely on your own. In most cases, your professor or the authors of assigned readings will already have defined and/or operationalized concepts that are important to your research. And in the event that someone hasn't already come up with precisely the definition you need, other political scientists will in all likelihood have written enough on the topic that you are investigating to give you some clear guidance on how to proceed. For this reason, it is always a good idea to explore what research has already been done on your topic before you begin to construct your own argument.

To give you an example of the kind of rigor and objectivity political scientists aim for in their writing, let us examine how someone might operationalize a term. Reading through this example should clarify the level of analysis and precision that you will be expected to employ in your writing. Here is how you might define key concepts in a way that allows us to easure them.

We are all familiar with the term "democracy." If you were asked to define the term, you might make a statement like the following: "Democracy is government by the people." You would, of course, be correct-democracy is government by the people. Yet, in order to evaluate whether or not a particular government is fully democratic or is more or less democratic when compared with other governments, we would need to have more precise criteria with which to measure or assess democracy. Most political scientists agree that, at a minimum, these criteria should include the following rights and freedoms for citizens:

1. Freedom to form and join organizations

2. Freedom of expression

3. Right to vote

4. Eligibility for public office

5. Right of political leaders to compete for support

6. Right of political leaders to compete for votes

7. Alternative sources of information

8. Free and fair elections 9. Institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference

By adopting these nine criteria, we now have a definition that will allow us to measure democracy. Thus, if you want to determine whether or not Brazil is more democratic than Sweden, you can evaluate each country in terms of the degree to which it fulfills the above criteria.

The Purpose of a Political Science Paper

You want your paper to be persuasive. In order to persuade, the paper must contain an argument that is your own. In addition, it should adduce evidence to support that argument from primary or secondary sources, from historical or contemporary events, from thought experiments, etc. Your goal is to persuade readers. This means readers should never be tempted to stop reading! Three things that can make your audience stop reading, but that are under your control, are content, structure, and style.

Your paper’s content should be made clear to readers from the outset. The paper’s title should give an indication of the general topic and — if appropriate — of your thesis. The first sentence should draw the reader in: make sure it runs well and is not too long! The reader should know what your argument is by the end of the first few paragraphs, and roughly how you intend to prove it one or two paragraphs later. At this point, if readers are still reading, you can assume that they are at least interested.

For the rest of the paper, make sure you do not lose your audience. Make both structure and style as easy to follow as you can. Your argument should proceed smoothly from one paragraph to the next, and it ought to be internally consistent. Sentences should make sense and not run on. Your instructor will criticize spelling, grammatical errors, or inconsistent use of tense, as it is important to realize that all of these are barriers to understanding your argument. Each time the reader has to pause or go back to make sure he or she has read a word or a sentence correctly, you provide a small temptation to stop reading. In addition, you make it harder to follow your argument. Nothing should come between your reader and your argument; least of all eminently preventable problems such as spelling errors.

At the end of your paper, you should restate your argument and the main points you have made—do not assume the reader has remembered everything exactly. You want to leave readers with an impression that reflects the whole paper, not just the last part of your argument.

Below are some practical suggestions to help you write a better paper. Note the word “suggestions”: these are not absolute rules. Indeed, there are very few absolute rules in writing. However, if you do choose to ignore one of these suggestions, you should at least think it through for yourself and have a good reason for your decision.

One way to proceed in writing a paper

1. Choose a paper topic (if not already provided for you). Pick a topic that interests you, and about which you would like to learn more. A lack of interest in your topic means that the research will be less rewarding and that you will be less likely to do much of it. Moreover, if you do not find your topic interesting, you are unlikely to make it interesting to your readers. In other words, your paper is less likely to be successful at persuading anyone.

2. Decide what you want to argue, preferably without referring directly to the source material.

3. Write an outline of the paper, listing the important points to be made in the different paragraphs, still without referring directly to the material, although you may want to note which author, passage, etc. you think you will want to refer to.

4. Write an introductory paragraph, closing with your thesis. The exact contents of this paragraph may need to be changed at the end, but it is important to have a thesis in your mind as you write.

5. Write a first draft of your conclusion. This will give you an idea of what you need to work towards as you write. The conclusion should restate your thesis and the most important point(s) from the body of the paper. It is not the place to introduce new ideas for the first time!

6. Do the actual writing (see below)

7. Rewrite your conclusion, making sure you do not claim to have argued, shown, or proven something unless you have indeed done so in the preceding pages.

8. Rewrite your introductory paragraph, making sure your thesis statement matches the conclusion and the argument throughout the paper.

9. Write a brief road-map paragraph, to follow the introduction, which gives the reader an idea of how you are going to persuade her. This is where you would indicate which authors or subjects you are going to discuss (and in what context), for example.

10. Proofread, spell-check, and read your paper aloud to make sure it sounds right.

How to make and support an argument

1. If you are going to be commenting on books, articles, etc., do not assume the reader knows or can guess what you are talking about. Give a brief paraphrase or synopsis of the main argument of the passage or work you are discussing.

2. The burden is upon you to make sure the reader does not suspect you misrepresent an author to the latter’s disadvantage. This is where quotations may come in handy. Use them sparingly, however. If you fall for the temptation to string quotations together, you will not be making any argument of your own. As a rule, try to avoid quoting passages longer than 3 lines, unless you feel doing so is crucial to supporting your argument.

3. The burden is also upon you to make sure you do not represent the writing and ideas of others as your own, even accidentally! When you make a claim, make it clear whether this is your argument or that of one of the authors. When you cite or paraphrase an author, make sure it is followed by a correct citation (do not cite a random page in a book!). Not giving credit for sentences, ideas, or facts that are not common knowledge is tantamount to plagiarism, and will be treated seriously! To avoid inadvertently quoting an author from your notes, always try to use your own language — just changing 1 or 2 words in a sentence is not enough.

4. Whether you agree or disagree with an author, make it clear which is the case, and explain why!. Do not just assume that this will be obvious to the reader.

5. Think through the implications of your argument. Think of the logical extreme implied by your argument, and see if you agree with yourself. If not, you may want to qualify your claims.

6. Similarly, make it a point to write down the two strongest objections to your argument. Do not content yourself merely with thinking through them—write them down. This will make it more difficult accidentally to overlook an aspect of an objection you cannot handle satisfactorily.

7. Make sure your argument is coherent. Do not jump from one topic to the next randomly. Make the connection between different parts of your argument clear. If you find it impossible to proceed smoothly from one paragraph to the next, you need to re-examine your argument!

8. On a related note, make sure there is a sense of progression to the argument. The reader must be drawn from one paragraph to the next and be able to follow along with your argument in a natural manner. For example, do not make your main point first, and then pad with some marginally related smaller issues. Your audience will lose interest before you get to the end.

Handy checklist for reviewing a paper

1. Does the paper have a short introductory section ending with a clear statement of the argument? Does the paper have a short concluding section that restates the argument and pulls everything together?

2. Have you thought about how authors you criticize (or ignore) might respond to your argument?

3. Are any of the paragraphs longer than 2/3 of a page? If so, check whether the paragraph makes more than one point, and consider rewriting it or splitting it into two parts.

4. Have you not toyed with margins and font size to a noticeable degree? If your paper is considerably longer than the assigned length, you may be trying to tackle too much at once — simplify your main argument and cut out paragraphs that do not add to it. If your paper is considerably shorter, you may be approaching the issue too simplistically. (Have you really considered item 2 above? Most authors we read are/were intelligent people, and cannot just be waved off in a single paragraph).

5. Have you either a) read the paper out loud or b) given it to a friend to look at? Try to catch typos, confusing language, and holes in your argument before handing it in.

6. Have you spell-checked and proofread again after you made your final, small changes?

Some issues of style

As noted above, you must indicate the source (in some standard citation format) of every quotation. Quoting a lot is not a good idea, but leaving off quotation marks to reduce the apparent amount of quotation is considerably worse (and opens you up to charges of plagiarism).

Avoid sentences that run longer than 3 lines, where possible. They slow down the reader unnecessarily, and the longer the sentence, the greater the risk that it becomes badly structured.

Look up any word of whose meaning you are not entirely sure!! Even a slight shade of difference between a word’s meaning and the one you intend can colour or distort your argument.

Be careful with your use of this, these, etc. Is it clear what these words are referring to (usually the subject or object of the previous sentence)? If there is any ambiguity, try to rewrite your sentence so you can eliminate the issue.

Common errors to check for: cite vs. site vs. sight, its vs. it’s, principle vs. principal, imminent vs. immanent, accept vs. except. See homophones.