POL S 205 Winter 2014

Homework 1

DUE 5pm on 01/22/14 via Canvas

Upload a Word (.doc/.docx) or PDF (.pdf) of your homework response no later than 5pm on Wednesday, January 22. You must use Canvas to submit the exercise (under Homework Exercise 1 at https://canvas.uw.edu/assignments).

I. Why Vote? By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT (11/06/05 in NYT)

Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.

What are you doing here? one asks.

My wife made me come, the other says.

The first economist gives a confirming nod. The same.

After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll never tell anyone I saw you. They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost – in time, effort, lost productivity – with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your civic duty. As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, A rational individual should abstain from voting.

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.

But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters’ hands – most vividly exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast in their home precincts.

Part 1: Consider existing research to determine its research question and form a potential hypothesis.

1a. What is a valid research question that flows from the knowledge presented in Part I above?

1b. What theoretical answers (potential IVs) could we offer for the question you wrote in 1a? List three possible answers/IVs.

1c. State one of the theoretical answers you gave in 1b in the form of a testable hypothesis.

Part 2: Pose your own research question, theory, and literature review for a project of interest to you. Make sure to complete each component in the list to receive full marks.

2a. Develop a falsifiable research question that relates to politics or society.

2b. Propose a theory for answering your question.

2c. Use library search tools discussed in the lab section to identify two articles addressing your question. These two sources should address the same topic. One should come from a major newspaper (e.g., New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times), and the other source should come from an academic journal (e.g., American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Social Science Quarterly).

2d. Prepare a one-page response (300–400 words total) that addresses both of the following:

i. Importance of your research question: What makes your research question an important area of inquiry? What do you find interesting about the topic?

ii. Coverage of the topic in the news media vs. an academic article: How did the coverage compare? How did these differ in the slant they put on the topic, the detail of coverage, the extent to which they left out key points, or in other important ways? Did the articles corroborate or contradict your theory?

2e. Provide full citations of articles referenced, a brief summary of the search routines used (100 words or less), and the website URLs where you located the items.