Introduction
In this class we spend a lot of time reading about and listening about and thinking about states in general. That includes thinking about the comparative method and how to compare and contrast states in meaningful ways that tell us something about the causes of their differences. We also spend some time looking specifically at Florida, which makes sense since our college is located in Florida and many of you either currently call the state home, or have done so in the past. In this assignment I would like to give you an opportunity to learn more about a state of your choosing, and then we will use the comparative method to ascertain differences between your chosen state and Florida and then try to explain the causes of those differences. Please note you CANNOT choose Washington, D.C. for this project as Washington D.C. is not a state. You can choose Washington state (i.e. the one up in the northwest) but please make sure you are actually describing Washington state and not Washington, D.C. if you choose to do that one. It’s probably best to avoid it altogether by choosing one of the other 48 states to compare to Florida.
The total paper should be a minimum of 2300 words. That is nine to eleven pages or so if you are double-spacing and using standard fonts, but it’s the word count that matters. This is a substantial assignment; for many of you it might be the longest paper you have yet written in college. The good news is that it’s a very structured assignment, and if you instead think of it as three smaller papers (see below) it is not nearly so intimidating!
Components of the Paper
There are essentially three components to this paper. Feel free to structure your paper in this order or in any other way you see fit:
1) Description of the government structure and politics of the state you have chosen.
2) Compare and contrast that state with the government and politics of Florida.
3) Explain why you think those differences exist – what are the root causes of them?
Section 1 – Description of Chosen State
This section is going to comprise the bulk of your paper. I would like you to describe for the reader (that’s me, in case you didn’t know) the following about your chosen state: how does it divide power among its three branches? Does it seem to have a particularly powerful governor or legislature? How does the legislature work? Are there term limits? How long do people serve for? Who holds the real power in the state? What is the partisan breakdown of the state? Does one party seem to win more often than another? What is the political culture of the state? How does its history seem to affect its current politics? Who are the major interest groups or economic sectors that power the economy of the state? What are the big issues currently in state politics there?
I would expect this part of the paper to be about two-thirds of the length of the paper in total and it’s mostly descriptive. I’m not really asking you to analyze much here. You’re gathering the information you’ll need for the next two sections.
Section 2 – Comparison with Florida
In this section of the paper I would like you compare your state with Florida on a number of dimensions: demographics, economics, government structure, political culture, important interest groups, and party balance. You’re not necessarily trying to explain the differences yet (that will be Section 3), but since there’s some overlap it’s also totally okay if you combined the two sections.
Section 3 – Explanation of Differences
In this section of the paper I would like you to hypothesize about the sources of the differences you found in Section 2. What might explain why your chosen state and Florida are different on these dimensions? Is it political culture? History? Geography? Demography? Climate? For this section I am grading you based on the plausibility of your analysis, along with the quality of any evidence you present for it.
Number of Sources
I am asked pretty much every semester some version of the question “how many sources does my paper need to have?” This is a weird question to me, since the honest answer is “how ever many you need to write a good paper”, but I get why students ask it. A little guidance is always a good thing. Let me say this, then. It would be very hard to do well on this paper with less than five academic sources (i.e. not Wikipedia, Investopedia, and other encyclopedic sources). You probably will want more than that, but at a minimum I’d be aiming for that. Once you hit five sources that doesn’t mean you are done doing research – if three of your sources are all about one part of the paper then you’re going to need more in total to write a compelling paper. The sources can be things like academic journals or books, but they can also be government websites, reputable think tank/interest group websites (though here you have to be a more critical of the sourcing) and reputable news sources like CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or local/state newspapers.
Citations/Plagiarism – Read this very, very, very carefully
You should be using high-quality sources for this paper. That means that while you can consult Wikipedia as a start, you should be using additional sources. This can include academic journals and books but it can also include newspapers, government and university websites, or any other high-quality, reliable source. If you are going to use web-based sources, make sure (as always) to consider who the source of the website is. Are they credible? Do they have expertise? What’s their angle or bias? MAKE SURE TO USE IN-TEXT CITATIONS in your paper. I don’t particularly care what format they are (MLA vs APA vs Chicago) just so long as (a) you stay consistent in the paper and (b) I can figure out how to find each source myself if I so choose.
THIS PART IS SUPER IMPORTANT. MAKE SURE TO USE IN-TEXT CITATIONS in your paper. What do I mean by in-text citation? It means that any time you reword someone’s ideas or information in your own words, or if you directly quote them, you let the reader know right there in the body of the paper where you got that information from. You can do this using footnotes or endnotes but the main way people do it these days is through paranthetical citations at the end of sentences like so. (Fuerstman, 2023). This is different from a Works Cited page – which you’ll also want to include at the end of the paper.
I don’t particularly care what format your in-text citations and your Works Cited page are (MLA vs APA vs Chicago) just so long as (a) you stay consistent in the paper and (b) I can figure out how to find each source myself if I so choose. If all of this sounds very unfamiliar to you, I’d recommend checking out this page from Scribbr. Scribbr is also a great source for helping you format citations.
Remember that whenever you use someone’s idea, either in a direct quote or reworded yourself, you should use a citation. Using someone’s words or ideas without citation is plagiarism and doing so will lead to a minimum of a zero on the paper and quite possibly failure of the class.
Finally, and this bit is also very important, you are more than welcome to use any AI/LLM (such as ChatGPT, Bing, Claude, Bard, etc.) to help you write your paper. If you do, please know two things. First, in your Works Cited page you should include a short paragraph just telling me how you used AI. No need to lie or anything – it’s 100% okay to use it. Second, you need to independently verify and cite sources for any information provided to you by the AI. Remember, these models do not know things in the way that we use the term. They will absolutely make stuff up and state it confidently. If you use it to generate text that says “on January 15, 2014 the United States bombed Latvia”, you’d better have a citation to a non-AI source for that right there in your paper (and not a citation to the AI itself since, again, it could be hallucinating).
For more information on citations, see the page in the Research Paper Module titled “Citations and Plagiarism”