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OCTOBER 5, 2008
CAMPAIGN RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT -- PART 1
Overview --- Description, Comparison, Analysis & Assessment:
These four words summarize my assessment of the quality of your constituency report. The most basic step is description: paint me a concise but comprehensive picture of the district in politically relevant terms. That's the foundation, but description is not very helpful without some sort of context. So the next step is comparison: how does the district compare to the state and to the nation? How do the component parts of the district compare to each other? Putting the description in context makes it more electorally useful. The final step is analysis and assessment: use the data to reach meaningful conclusions. This is where you earn the big bucks as a political analyst. Data don't speak for themselves; it's your job to draw useful conclusions.
So, what do these three steps look like in practice? Let's examine voting data.
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Basic description: you report the results of recent elections for this particular congressional seat, preferably by county. Results from smaller units are always more useful than results from larger ones.
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Comparison: for the same electoral units (e.g., counties) you report the results from other races in the same years, races like President, senator, governor, Secretary of State, state auditor, and state treasurer. Now the voting data for your race has a context, but you still haven't extracted much meaning from it.
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Analysis and assessment: you use the data from your own race and from the comparative races to compute electorally valuable measures such as "normal party vote," "electoral volatility."
In the end, the electoral usefulness of your report is a function of how effectively you have moved beyond mere description to useful comparison and eventually to genuine analysis and assessment. In a just world effective description would probably earn a grade of C. Useful comparison would earn a grade of B. And genuine analysis would earn a grade of A. But then grades are always a balance between justice and compassion.
SAMPLE ASSIGNMENT
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