PS7710: ASSIGNMENT

TOPIC: REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS LITERATURE

Like political science as a whole, comparative politics has changed significantly from the beginning of the century. This assignment gives you direct experience in the nature of those changes. The reading part of this task is relatively simple:

• look at one edition of the American Political Science Review (APSR) for each decade of the century just ended (try to look at editions that are approximately 10 years apart),
• estimate to what degree the articles are comparative in nature,
• read one comparative article in each of the editions you select

The writing part of the task will require some thought.  On the basis of your reading, I would like you to write a five page paper that does the following:

• evaluates, using concrete references where necessary, how the methods and approaches of comparative politics (as represented in the APSR) have changed over time,
• evaluates the relative place of comparative politics within the discipline of political science (as represented in the APSR. This caveat is necessary because the APSR is often criticized for reflecting interests other than those of political scientists as a whole).
• calculates the approximate share of comparative articles (not front matter, research notes, book reviews, or any other category of notes and reviews) within the full set of articles for each year, presented in a table similar to the one below.  This chart is the least important of the tasks so do not let it consume too much of your time. Make guesses based on titles (or the first page of the article if you cannot tell from the title). All I am looking for is a rough approximation to help us make quantitative as well as qualitative comparisons:

  Year	Month	Total number of articles	Total number of comparative articles	Comparative articles as a percentage of all articles
  1907	May	3	2	67%
  1917	May	5	2	40%
  1927	May	3	1	33%
  and so on...	...	...	...	...
  1997	June	11	4	36%

  
   

The journals are available in two forms:

• If you have computer access, the easiest method may be the on-line archive at JSTOR which lists all the articles by edition and then provides full text copies of the articles. This is time and memory consuming, so you probably want to do it at an on-campus machine (and in fact it may not be possible to use JSTOR from off campus). Let me know if you need help arranging that,
• If you do not have computer access or comfort, you may look at the editions in the Purdy-Kresge Research Library. Unfortunately 1906-1960 are on microfilm and only the volumes after 1960 are kept in hardbound form. Still, this is better than nothing.

If both of these methods should prove impossible, please contact me as soon as possible so that we can work on other arrangements. In the meantime if you have questions you can reach me by phone or email.

DEADLINE:

• Monday, September 25
• The paper is due at 4:30 p.m. on the due date.  Late papers are assessed a penalty of 1/3 of a grade (i.e. from an A to an A-) per 24 hour period of lateness.

FORMAT:

• normal 1 inch margins
• 10 or 12 point type
• double-spaced
• spell-checked
• your name is on it

EXAMPLES:

• For examples of papers with nearly-perfect thesis statements, see: well-written student essays
• For more specific information on thesis statements and outlines, you can see a variety of on-line resources.  The best I have found is:
  The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing" which is a companion to Michael Harvey's book of the same name.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

• Log on to blackboard (http://blackboard.wayne.edu)
• Click on the listing for this course
• Click on the digital drop box link in blue (clicking on the green button will just take you to the same page over and over again)
• Click on the button that says "Send file" (not the one that says Add File)
• Press the Browse button to search for the file that you have written and want to send.
• Click "open" once you've found the right file.
• Assign it a name that corresponds to the assignment
• If the option is available, add some text in the comment section.
• Press "Submit".
• You will receive a receipt for your security.

CONTACT:

If you have any questions or difficulties with either of these questions please

• call me at 248-336-2538,
• visit me at 2053 FAB
• or email me at:

Good luck, and enjoy.