Field Seminar in Comparative Politics

Appendix I: Hints On The Readings

1. Keep a written abstract of the readings for each week, even if you are not writing a paper. The knowledge you accumulate during your first two years will fall out of even the biggest brains if you don’t capture it in writing. Your abstract need not be more than one page (in bulleted form) for books and as little as half that for articles.
2. For each work, read until you feel you understand the main argument. Then stop and write down that argument in a sentence. This task will be relatively straightforward for articles in peer-reviewed journals, for which there is normally an abstract at the front of the article; it may be harder for book, especially older books. Sometimes, it is helpful to try to summarize the argument as a boxes-and-arrows diagram (A > B > C; [C + D] > E.).
3. Think about the argument that you have just written down. Does it make logical sense? Is it plausible on its face? If it is illogical or implausible, can you state it in a way that does make sense? Write down your reflections in a bullet point or two.
4. Think about what sorts of evidence might support or contradict this argument. Jot down a few “observable implications” of the argument.
5. As you read the rest of the article, keep track of whether the author presents evidence for her argument. Jot down, in bullet point form, the evidence that is presented.
6. Stop and reflect on the evidence presented. Is this evidence compelling? Is causality established? Are there obvious confounding variables not addressed? What additional evidence would be persuasive? Write your assessment in a couple of bullet points.
7. Leave space at the end of your abstract for ideas that occurred to you as you were reading, any clever quotes you may want to use in your own work, etc.
8. Feel free to form study groups to go over the material and share the burden of writing up summaries of the readings. Whether you do so and how you do it is entirely up to you (and outside my purview); however, I would still recommend going through the exercise sketched out above on your own.