This is an empirical research type of paper. There needs to be data. The topic is ELECTION OF TRUMP AND THE DIVISION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. I am providing an example of how the paper should be. The paper should have
1) an abstract page
2)body
3) reference page
4)graphs with data
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Research Manuscript Formatting and Substance Guidelines Research manuscripts must be typeset using LaTex and submitted in PDF form. The default formatting offered by LaTex – double-spacing, one-inch margins, 12-point font selection, etc. – is preferred. An important alteration to the default settings is the inclusion of line numbers in the left-hand margin of the document. The inclusion of these line numbers will make reviewers’ references easier to follow. This can be done simply by adding two lines of code to the “header” of your document:
\usepackage{lineno} \linenumbers
The remaining style and substance guidelines are as follows. Title Page. Your title page should include your manuscript title, your name, your institutional affiliation, and your email address. There should be a 250-word abstract below these pieces of information. Where acknowledgements are appropriate, they should be included in a footnote. This first page of the PDF should not have a page number at the bottom. The first page of the manuscript’s actual text is numbered “1.” A full-length research manuscript is generally comprised of 25 pages of text, inclusive of tables and figures. Your works cited pages are not part of this count. Introduction. 3-4 double-spaced pages. There are at least five important paragraphs to have in an introductory section, although this number – and the order in which they appear – can vary somewhat depending on what type of article you’re writing. At the least, I would suggest the following paragraphs:
(1) present the research question and contextualize it with prior scholarship (2) motivate the importance of the question either in terms of empirical / current events examples and / or holes in prior scholarship (3) describe your answer / approach / theory to answering the question (4) describe the novelty / contribution / importance of your answer (5) outline the remainder of the paper, foreshadow the results, and possibly foreshadow the implications of your findings
The introductory section should also have 15-30 carefully selected citations. Keep in mind that most reviewers’ assessments of your work are at least 50% solidified after having finished reading only the introductory section. It’s important to send all the right signals early on about your research being competently motivated, framed, theorized, and executed. The citations you draw on here serve as a sort of conceptual shorthand to get reviewers thinking about the research question in the way that you want them to.
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Theory. 8-10 double-spaced pages. The theory section is a paragraph-by-paragraph attempt to link your explanation to your outcome in finite steps. I think that most LSU graduate students simply treat this section as a literature review and then end up stating their hypotheses hastily toward the end. Here is a provocative mantra that you should keep in mind: unless your argument is extremely complicated and draws on very diverse literatures it is never a good idea to have a literature review section that is separate from the theory section or from an hypothesis section. The only virtue of reviewing prior literature is to help build the step-by-step arguments of your theory. Consider an example. Let’s suppose that my research question is: what is the effect of large campaign contributions on parties’ ideological extremity? In order to develop an hypothesis that answers this question, I begin by establishing the pieces of the argument on their most basic level and build up from there. — Parties want to win elections. — Parties need to reach voters in order to do this. — Parties need resources to reach voters. — Not all resource-holders are equally endowed with resources. — To spend their energies efficiently, parties should court big donors in particular.
— Big donors (i.e. corporations and labor unions) tend to be more ideologically extreme than the general population of voters. — Donors prefer to donate to parties that are ideologically proximate. — Parties therefore strategically become more extreme to increase their odds of getting these donations.
Each plank or step of this argument can constitute its own paragraph in the theory section. Within each paragraph, you include the requisite citations to prior work that has demonstrated some facet of that particular piece of logic. Whenever I am writing a theory section, I first list out the steps to the argument; that is, I ask myself what pieces of logic in sequence build the bridge between my IV and my DV. Then I let those logical pieces serve as the outline of the theory section itself. Data. 6-8 double-spaced pages. The data section is where you describe the contours of your data set (the number and types of cases, the geographic and temporal scope, etc.) as well as three individual sets of variables: (1) the dependent variable, (2) the independent variable or variables, and then (3) as many control variables as the prior literature indicates you should include. You need to offer conceptual and empirical definitions of each variable and justify your decisions here. Descriptive statistics and illustrative empirical examples can be helpful in this section (although a full table of descriptive statistics on all the variables in your analysis is typically something that is relegated to an appendix nowadays).
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Analysis. 6-8 double-spaced pages. The analysis section should begin with one or multiple paragraphs of very clear explication of the regression model you are relying on. Sometimes it can help to describe the model mathematically. Be sure to cover any additional modifications you’re making to the model such as robust standard errors, fixed effects or random intercepts, panel corrections, time serial corrections, etc. Then present the regression models themselves, being sure to discuss overall model fit, the direction and significance of individual coefficients of interest, and the extent to which these things either do or do not support specific hypotheses from your theoretical section. Finally, offer some substantive description of the results (such as a one standard deviation increase in this IV results in a sizable increase in the DV). If you are working with interaction terms, you want marginal effects plots. If you are working with categorical models, you want plots of predicted probabilities or first differences. Remember that, in all these cases, you need confidence intervals – or similar measures of uncertainty – to convey an adequate measure of statistical significance to the reader. Conclusion. 2-3 double-spaced pages. Concluding sections reiterate your findings, paying special attention to contextualizing their significance in terms of prior literature. Remind the readers about what debate you’re contributing to. Be sure to spell out avenues for future work, but not in a careless manner. Really think about how your findings can serve as a springboard for new, previously unobtainable research projects. Research projects can be solidly executed, but nevertheless remain unpublished it the researcher cannot point to specific ramifications or impacts resulting from the research. Figures and Tables. For the purposes of our class, figures and tables should be embedded in the text around the first point at which they’re mentioned (rather than pasted on separate pages at the end of the manuscript). Bibliography and Citations. There is not a minimum number of required citations, although I have noticed that LSU grad students tend to cite far too few prior works. I would shoot for at least 60-80 citations in the early drafts of your manuscript. I imagine that your final draft s will easily surpass 80 citations. Citations should be in line with the APSR style file (.bst) that links to your LaTex file. This will do most of the work for you in terms of automatically creating in-text citations at the appropriate points in the manuscripts and populating entries in the works cited section. Footnotes. Footnotes should be double-spaced and include information about alternative model specifications, measurement strategies, sidebars in the theoretical discussion, references to appendices and supplementary materials, and so forth. A large number of footnotes indicates to readers that the researcher has done a thorough job of exploring alternative ideas, counterarguments, and other potential objections. A manuscript with no footnotes indicates that the researcher’s thinking has rarely moved beyond the main text. Appendices. Every good research manuscript will have at least a handful of appendices of robustness checks, descriptive statistics, more details on coding, etc. Be sure that you have some of these (they are usually not subject to page limits from journals, so they’re a great place to bury additional details that take up a lot of space in the manuscript).
