I would like you to pick two contemporary countries in the following manner, and this part is important so make sure you read it carefully. One country must come from Table 7.1 on page 179/180 of the textbook and it cannot be either the United States or the United Kingdom, . The other country must come from Table 10.1 on page 485/486 of the textbook and it cannot be China or Nigeria. You are then going to summarize, compare and contrast the government and politics of those two countries.

Your first job is to summarize the government and politics of each country. Is it a democracy or an authoritarian government? Where does power reside in the country? How many political parties are there? How long has the current regime been in place? If there are elections, are they free and fair? How is the government structured? Is it a federal or unitary system? What are the major political issues dominating the country right now? How strong is the economy? What kind of economic system do they use?

Please DO NOT merely summarize information available elsewhere – anyone can check out Wikipedia – but try to go beyond to explain why the government and politics of your country function like they do. Is there a distinctive history that shapes current politics? Are there geographic considerations that are important? Ethnic, religious, or cultural divisions?

Once you have discussed each of the countries separately, you should compare the two. How are they different and how are they similar? What seems to explain the differences? Is it history? Geography? Political culture? Governance? Try and go beyond just saying “country X has this type of government, country Y has this type”. Your goal should be to think of reasons why your two countries might differ. This is the hardest, and most speculative, part of the paper.

Paper Structure

You should structure your paper in the following way:

Introduction

The introduction should tell the reader what the paper is going to be about, including a mention of which two countries are going to be compared. The best papers will have a central thesis, argument or overarching theme about the two countries being compared, but this is not strictly necessary to receive a good grade on the paper.

Body paragraphs

Your first job is to summarize the government and politics of each country. Is it a democracy or an authoritarian government? Where does power reside in the country? How many political parties are there? How long has the current regime been in place? If there are elections, are they free and fair? How is the government structured? Is it a federal or unitary system? What are the major political issues dominating the country right now? How strong is the economy? What kind of economic system do they use?

Please DO NOT merely summarize information available elsewhere – anyone can check out Wikipedia – but try to go beyond to explain why the government and politics of your country function like they do. Is there a distinctive history that shapes current politics? Are there geographic considerations that are important? Ethnic, religious, or cultural divisions?

Once you have discussed each of the countries separately, you should compare the two. How are they different and how are they similar? What seems to explain the differences? Is it history? Geography? Political culture? Governance? Try and go beyond just saying “country X has this type of government, country Y has this type”. Your goal should be to think of reasons why your two countries might differ. This is the hardest, and most speculative, part of the paper.

Conclusion

A brief conclusion should summarize the main points of the paper and indicate what you learned from the assignment about comparative politics.

Formatting

The total length of the paper is 1500. That is roughly 5 double-spaced pages with normal font and margins. Please put the word count on the front page of your paper. 

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.

Citations/Plagiarism – Read this carefully

You should be using academic sources for this paper. That means that while you can consult Wikipedia as a start, you should be using additional sources, possibly including global newspapers, scholarly books and journal articles and government websites. 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.

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. Please include a Works Cited page IN ADDITION TO the in-text citations. Failure to do so will result in a 10% penalty.