This project is an exercise in the scholarly study of public policy analysis. Students are expected to perform the following tasks:
(a) Choose a substantive issue pertaining to public policy formulation, adoption, implementation, program evaluation, ethics of policy analysis, etc. The choice may pertain to an empirical issue, or it may deal with a normative topic.
(b) Examine a substantial portion of the social scientific or scholarly literature analyzing that issue.
(c) Select one or more explanations or perspectives from that literature (or derive a new approach) for the chosen phenomenon.
(d) Confer with the prof (face to face or by phone or e-mail) to discuss the project. This may be done at the start of the student’s research, if desired. At some point students who are examining an empirical issue should be able to state, in hypothesis form, what observable implications can be drawn from their explanation(s).
Students should also be able to state the assumptions from which their hypothesis is derived. Students dealing primarily with a normative issue need to be able to state a particular thesis and also the premises from which that thesis may be derived. Each student must be prepared to identify what literature he/she has read in researching his/her topic. Each student is required to submit a written version of a paper proposal.
The written proposal should contain a stated hypothesis or thesis, the premises upon which the argument(s) is/are based, and a preliminary bibliography. Failure to turn in a research proposal by the due date will cause a reduction in the research paper grade by one-third of a letter grade.
(e) Prepare a short follow-up progress report (including an outline of the paper itself). The progress report should include a brief statement describing progress gained from the time that the project proposal was submitted. At the very least, the student should have completed an introductory section of the paper, as well as a discussion of the background of the problem to be examined, and an extensive review of the pertinent literature. These sections must be included within the progress report.
There must also be an expanded bibliography that demonstrates considerable progress gained since the submission of the proposal. Failure to submit a progress report by the due date will also cause a reduction of the project grade by one-third of a letter grade.
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(f) Write a paper, roughly 12-15 pages long, evaluating the explanation(s) or thesis as applied to the substantive topic. The paper should be written using APA citation format. The instructor will be happy to read and make comments upon rough drafts of student papers before the final draft is submitted.
The methodological approach used in the paper is pretty much up to the student. In-depth case studies of single events, comparative case studies of two or more events, bibliographic essays comparing several explanations or perspectives in general terms, qualitative examinations of trends over time or across different agencies or states, cities, etc., or statistical analyses of large numbers of cases are all permissible.
Students may find newspapers, magazines, government documents, and a variety of Internet sources helpful in doing the paper. If so, they are encouraged to use them. Yet these sources are not generally adequate to provide an understanding of social science explanations. For that reason students must rely upon some scholarly journals and/or books as sources. Journals dealing generally with public organizations, bureaucracy, and policy may be especially helpful.
These include Public Administration Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Policy Studies Journal, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and others. General social science journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Sociological Review, and the American Economic Review may be helpful.
Newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal may be useful, but they should not be relied upon exclusively. The papers should have a minimum of eight articles from peer-reviewed journals cited in the references and used in the text of the paper.
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