1. The goal of this assignment is for you to develop/refine a skill that is critical in political science. Each of you will choose a research question that interests you. Then, you will systematically examine the literature that relates to that topic. The only requirement is that your question pertains in some way to international relations (as defined in the introductory lectures). Here are the steps. Step one is only required if you do not choose a question from the list below. You can consult with me at any time on step one before the sources are due (see your syllabus). HERES MY REVIEW TOPIC: 8. Do countries tend to balance (join together to counter a threat) or bandwagon (join with the threat to avoid it) when confronted with a threatening country or group of countries?
2. Write a one-paragraph summary that includes the topic/question you choose along with a justification for that topic. Your justification should tell me why the question would be an important one to be able to answer. You should focus on a topic/question that has A) has a potential answer and B) has some literature. This will require you to do some basic research in advance to determine if there is enough literature out there for you to do a review. Please do not come to me and tell me you cannot find a question to research. There are THOUSANDS of research questions in IR. Find one, do your initial research to see if there is a literature out there, then turn in your paragraph. Once you have shown that initiative, I will dive in and help you, by providing feedback on your topic.
3. Provide me at least ten peer-reviewed sources that apply to your research question. We will talk about peer-reviewed sources in class.
   Here are the items that should be in your literature review.
4. The main theoretical developments in the literature
5. The main hypotheses in the literature
6. The main variables (dependent and independent) from the literature
7. Your analysis of the suitability of measurements in the existing literature n terms of reliability and validity (worry more about validity)
8. The main conclusions reached in the literature review and your assessment of their validity.
   Overall, your paper should be about 8 pages long (double spaced). I DON’T count pages for grading purposes, but I know that you will want a guideline. Your paper should have an intro and a conclusion, but these should be short and to the point (1/2 page or so). I don’t grade directly on grammar or spelling unless it interferes with the clarity of your paper. The shorter your paper is, the shorter your intro and conclusion will be. Your paper must have a MINIMUM of ten peer-reviewed sources (as defined in class). This is a minimum. The syllabus will tell you when to present your initial sources. Your final review should have more.
   Your literature review should be integrative. This means that you should write your review point by point rather than source by source. For example, when you are talking about measurement in a paper about the relationship between power and war, you should discuss how each of the works in your review defines and measures the concept of power. Put another way, each section of your review should talk about one of the main five points above and talk about all of the literature with respect to that point. When you are taking notes on each item that you read, break your notes up according as follows:
9. What is the research question being asked in this work?
10. What is the theory presented in this work?
11. What are the hypotheses presented in this work?
12. What are the main variables in this work? Things that vary are what we study. So someone who is looking at the impact of democracy on war is studying war as a dependent variable (the thing we are trying to explain) and democracy as an independent variable (the thing were are using to explain the dependent variable)?
13. How is the work measuring the variables under study?
14. What are the findings of the study?
    If you do this for everything you read, you will then be able to put similar pieces of literature into similar groups on each of the sections of your literature review.
    Here is a good guide, published by UNC Charlotte, to writing literature reviews. The internal links are not relevant, but the content is. https://politicalscience.uncc.edu/sites/politicalscience.uncc.edu/files/media/docs/litreviews.pdf

Please let me know if you have any questions. The final project, as well as the topic and sources, are due as outlined in the syllabus. If you have a final draft done in advance, I would be happy to look at it. Good luck!
Here are some research ideas to get you started. More than one student may pick a topic. However, this is not group work. Feel free to pick something that is not on this list. If Safe Assign detects significant overlap between papers that will count as cheating per university guidelines. Sources are sometimes similar, and the structure of all of your papers with have some similarities regardless of topic, but nothing else should be. Some of these topics have literature reviews that exist. Your job is to do your own. If you copy a scholarly literature review, I will know, so don’t do it.

1. Do economic sanctions work, and if so, under what circumstances?
2. Under what circumstances are countries more or less likely to follow global human rights law?
3. Under what circumstances does Power Transition Theory best predict the outbreak of hostilities at the system or dyadic level?
4. Under which circumstances does the idea of democratic peace work? You could also choose a review of the broader democratic peace literature.
5. What is the relationship between economic interdependence and international conflict?
6. What is the impact of debt and structural adjustment on political stability in developing countries?
7. What factors determine a country’s commitment to international environmental agreements?
8. Do countries tend to balance (join together to counter a threat) or bandwagon (join with the threat to avoid it) when confronted with a threatening country or group of countries?
9. What factors determine the intensity, often measured by battle deaths, of a particular armed conflict?
10. Do states exhibit “rational” behavior in their relations with other states? Under what circumstances is rational behavior more/less likely?
    Notice that these question/topic ideas don’t deal with one specific instance of a phenomenon. So, questions that look at the causes of WWII, why the Soviet Union collapsed, or how North Korea got nuclear weapons generally don’t work very well. The reason for that is that any individual incident has multiple “causes.” Logically, the only way to narrow down the list of causes is to look at a bunch of different cases (which is why science normally does) in order to eliminate as causes things that appear to matter in one case and not others. Think of it this way, if you were to drink bourbon with a little bit of water and become intoxicated (something you should not do), you might conclude that the water caused your intoxication based on a limited study of one case. However, if you repeated the experiment with straight water and straight bourbon, you would discover that it is something about bourbon that causes intoxication. Then, you do the same experiment with gin and tonic and discover that gin and bourbon have something in common that can cause intoxication. That is why we don’t study single cases very often in political science and that is also why your research question should focus on something beyond a single case.

Hey Trevor, where do I find peer-reviewed material for a literature review? Good question! If you are looking for scholarly work that has been evaluated by other scholars (without the identity of the reviewer(s) or the author being revealed, here are some places to look:

1. The library catalog: Almost all books published by a university press are peer reviewed. For this course, while it is not strictly true, I will count any book you get from a university library as peer-reviewed. Academic journals that we carry in print (not many) are also visible in the catalog. So are electronic versions of books.
2. Worldwide Political Science Abstracts: This is the most comprehensive source of political science literature to which our library subscribes. You can find this resource on the library page under databases and eresources or at https://search.proquest.com/wpsa. You may have to log in if you are not at the university and try to use this resource. If you need help generating search terms, you can ask, but make sure that you try on your own first. Make sure to check the box that says “peer reviewed” before you search. WPSA, in most cases, will tell you if the journal you find is available, electronically or otherwise, at USC Upstate. If the article/journal is not available, see item 4.
3. JSTOR: Available at http://www.jstor.org/action/showAdvancedSearch, JSTOR contains all full-text articles. You want to perform your advanced search by checking the box next to political science, so you don’t get a bunch of other stuff.
4. Pascal Delivers and Interlibrary Loan: Need something that we don’t have? Go to http://www.pascalcat.org/ and see if you can find it elsewhere in the USC system, and in most other public universities in SC. This works with books or articles in most cases. Pascal is better than an interlibrary loan in that you get to keep the item longer if it is a book and you generally get it faster. If the item isn’t available that way, you can request it via interlibrary loan at http://uscupstate.libguides.com/Library/ILL. This takes longer, so only use it if you definitely need that article or book.
5. Academic Search Complete (Ebsco): A lot like JSTOR, but a bit more general. Found at http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/advanced?vid=0&sid=e698ea64-0c8e-4c3a-a309-76b48e9b0e83%40sessionmgr4008. Ebsco has the advantage of having more current items. JSTOR items are often embargoed, which means that the last few years of a publication are not available.
   These resources should be more than enough to get you through a paper like this. If you have questions, ask. All due dates are described in the syllabus.