Do Campaigns Matter? / POS 2041 / Final Capstone Project

Overview

We have been building all semester to take on our final project Do Campaigns Matter? You will be, in teams, trying to answer a question which is ongoing in political science: do the activities of politicians leading up to elections have a measurable, and important, impact on vote choice? Despite years of research political scientists have not yet been able to identify positively a campaign impact on voter choice. Your goal will be to undertake this question answering it with quantitative data from one specific state. The purpose is to prepare you to write in the scholarly discourse.

Audience and Genre

This project is not primarily aimed at your QUANTA professors. Instead this is a scholarly article intended for publication and must conform to those conventions. These projects will be sent to the Florida Honor’s Conference. As a result, your team is writing for a multidisciplinary audience. Your audience is scholarly, but may or may not be completely familiar with your subject matter. This means it will be necessary for you to pay careful attention not only to the content, but to the requirements for a successful submission. In the real world, articles that don’t meet the minimum technical requirements don’t get read.

Assignment Requirements

All papers must contain the following items:

Introductory literature review

Testable hypothesis(es)

Systematic methodology

Discussion of results

Discussion of limitations

Conclusion

Technical Requirements

Font: Calabria, Helvetica, Times New Roman

Size: 11 - 12 pt

Spacing: 1 1/2 Spaced

Length: 10 - 15 pages

Citation Style: APA, in-text citations, no footnotes.

Margins: 1 inch all sides

Submission: to the dropbox in PDF format

Your article must have all of the following elements and meet all the technical requirements in order to receive a grade higher than a ‘C’

Evaluation Criteria

“A” Papers

Conduct an extensive literature review on the topic of campaigns. Pose testable, meaningful, and useful hypotheses. Accurately use appropriate methodologies to assess the validity of those hypotheses. Concisely convey in scholarly english the meaning of the methodological findings and appropriately explain how that data was derived. Discuss the implications of all findings, indicating where the study has limitations, and point to possible future research.

“B” Papers

Conduct a literature review on the topic of campaigns. Pose testable, meaningful and useful hypotheses. Use a systematic methodology to assess the validity of those hypotheses. Convey in scholarly english the meaning of the methodological findings and appropriately explain how that data was derived. Discuss the implications of the findings.

“C” Papers

Conduct a literature review on the topic of campaigns. Pose testable hypotheses. Use a systematic methodology to assess the validity of those hypotheses. Convey the meaning of the methodological findings and appropriately explain how that data was derived. Discuss the implications of the findings.

“D” Papers

Conduct a literature review on the topic of campaigns. Pose hypotheses. Use a methodology to assess those hypotheses. Convey the meaning of the methodological findings and explain how that data was derived. Discuss the findings.

“F” Papers

Do not meet the above.

Grading Rubric

Criteria / Points
Literature review / 10
Hypotheses / 30
Methodology / 30
Findings / 15
Implications / Limitations / 10
Conclusion / 5

Reminder: articles which do not meet all the technical requirements can receive no more than 75 points.