Department of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University
A Guide to
Writing a Senior Thesis in Government
2020-2021
A Guide to
Writing a Senior Thesis in Government
Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war
you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
- Winston Churchill
Cover photo credit: Thomas Earle, Photography Intern/Harvard University
Copyright 2019-2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College
Table of Contents
Preface ..............................................................................................1
Chapter One: Getting Started:
About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research ........................3
1.1 Getting O the Ground 3
1.2 Library Research 8
1.3 Developing Your Project 11
1.4 The Literature Review 12
1.5 Checking Your Progress 14
1.6 Working With Your Adviser 16
Chapter Two: Writing the Thesis ..........................................................17
2.1 On Writing, Thinking, and the Senior Thesis 17
2.2 Completing a Government Senior Thesis: Useful Strategies 24
Chapter Three: Gov 99 Matters ...........................................................29
3.1 Seminar Logistics 29
3.2 What Do You Do in Gov 99? 29
3.3 Specic Gov 99 Writing Requirements 30
3.4 Learning from Previous Theses 31
3.5 Framing the Question: Writing the Thesis Proposal 32
3.6 Peer Review 34
3.7 Reviewing Your Own Chapter 36
3.8 Dropping the Thesis and Gov 99 36
Chapter Four: Formatting, Submitting, and Grading .............................37
4.1 Formatting 37
4.2 Submitting the Thesis 40
4.3 The Thesis Grading Process 42
4.4 Thesis Prizes 45
End Matter .........................................................................................46
Bibliography ....................................................................................... 47
List of Figures
4.1 Thesis Title Page 39
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 1
preface
The Government
Senior Thesis
The decision whether or not to write a senior thesis and to pursue an
honors degree in the Government Department will have important
consequences for your final year at Harvard. Since writing a thesis will be
quite different from almost anything else you have undertaken, you may
well be wondering whether or not you are up to the task, or even whether
writing a thesis is the best way to mark the culmination of your academic
program. These are very real questions that you must decide for yourself.
While not the only or even primary determinant, you also should be aware
that the highest Latin honors for which students are eligible if they do not
write a thesis will be cum laude.
We in the Government Department and in the Undergraduate Program Oce would
like to help you make the choice that best suits your particular needs and interests. This
handbook aims to answer your procedural and substantive questions about the process of
thesis writing and honors determination, as well as to provide you with the accumulated
wisdom of seniors in Government who have gone through the process before you.
We urge you to read through the entire handbook and to use it as a reference
throughout the thesis-writing process. We have made every eort to address the problems and
questions that you are likely to encounter in the year ahead. A careful reading now may help you
approach the thesis process in a more productive manner, and should also help you avoid com-
mon mistakes and pitfalls that often result in a lower quality of work and lower thesis grades.
Once you have reviewed this handbook, please feel free to contact the Undergraduate
Program Oce with any concerns about the thesis process in general or your project in
particular.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 3
chapter one
Getting Started:
About Topics, Research
Questions and Thesis
Research
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein
1.1 Getting Off the Ground
You will return to school in the fall in various stages of the thesis process. Some of you
may still be developing a topic and trying to nd a thesis adviser; others may have spent the
summer doing archival, interview, observational, or data-set research; still others will have
taken previous work—such as a seminar paper or research project—and continued to read
background sources to situate your work in the larger theoretical literature. But everyone is
now faced with the same deadline: the thesis is due right before Spring Break in March, and
there are no exceptions. Regardless of where you are now, you need to get to work. Much
remains to be done in the next six months and deadlines loom. (Deadlines are exhilarating;
they focus the mind!)We have set these deadlines to help you pace your work appropriately,
but each one will still require a signicant investment of your time. In addition, start talking
with your adviser about setting additional deadlines for completing tasks.
As you begin, it may help to understand what you will produce in the end. Your
thesis will be neither a book nor a dissertation. It may serve as the basis for a larger and later
research project, should you go on to a doctoral program in political science or choose to try
to publish some of the results. But the thesis process is meant to produce a particular work
that demonstrates your competence to conduct basic research in political science and present
those results to the department’s teaching sta. As a result, there are things that your thesis
should and should not do. You should attempt to dene a unique question that has not been
previously answered, identify political phenomena or ideas that operate in some general (not
entirely particular) sense, and answer a smaller question adequately and persuasively rather
than a larger question inconclusively. You should not take a partisan position on a matter of
policy or politics or simply aggregate a host of sources (as you may have been asked to do
for previous research papers).
Potential thesis writers are often tempted to write a piece of direct political or policy
advocacy. Try not to succumb to this temptation. In political science, we begin by seek-
ing to understand what is going on behind the phenomena we observe and hope that our
nal conclusions follow from the evidence that we have gathered, analyzed, and presented.
Remember that your audience will be faculty and graduate students in political science.
They will evaluate your work for the level of scholarly achievement it contains: research,
results, analysis, and facts will impress and persuade them in ways that mere opinion and
advocacy will not.
page 4 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
An example of the dierence between advocacy and analysis may make this matter clearer.
Say you are interested in writing about the war in Iraq. You may or may not have found the
President’s reasons for going to war to be persuasive, but arguing the case either pro or con
would not be an appropriate topic for a senior thesis. You could, however, ask the following
question(s):What specic justications did the administration oer to justify the war in Iraq?
When and why did various reasons emerge, and how were they disseminated to the public?
1
Alternatively, a thesis exploring Just War Theory and the morality of promoting democracy
and liberal ideals abroad might very well contain a chapter on Iraq as a case study.
One of the rst things you need to do at this point is to nd an interest or topic that
excites you. There are going to be many times over the next few months when you will
get tired of your thesis. Without a fundamental curiosity or drive to know more about your
question, it will be tough to get through the dry spells that may come. But how do you
choose a topic and narrow it suciently to be manageable?
1. Find a topic or area that interests you and begin to rene it
The rst step is to discover your scholarly interests. The search for a thesis topic is a time
for self-examination. Look over your past work at Harvard and nd the themes that run
through the choices you have made. Indeed, each time you have made a decision about what
course to take, what book or article to read, or what paper topic to pursue, you have left a
clue about ideas that might combine scholarly potential with personal excitement. Do you
detect any patterns? (This is good practice for discerning patterns in social phenomena!)
Is there a question or event that jumps out at you? Upon further reection, does some-
thing puzzle you? Retrace the steps that led to your decision to become a Government
concentrator. What played the most important role in that decision?
Your initial inclination will most likely be toward a very broad topic: “I’m interested in
party systems.” Or the area of inquiry may be specic, but the topic is still extremely broad:
“The U.S. war in Iraq—that’s what I want to write on.” Or, “Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War fascinates me.” The important point is to focus in on something.
Most rst eorts at a topic are too broad. They lack focus and need an injection of special
interest or burning issues. To give focus to a broad interest, read widely in the subject until
some anomaly or surprise catches your eye. Ask yourself what specic concerns led you to
the general issue. How did you rst see the problem? Was there an important book? Was
there an important series of lectures? Is there a recurrent argument about current aairs? Talk
with others about the topic. What events stand out? Around what cases do the discussions
revolve? Formulate questions with these specic facts in mind.
A student interested in party systems, upon reection, might nd that she is especially
puzzled about the origins of party government. Her reading might lead her to the early
examples of party government in 18th century Britain. A discussion with a professor or
graduate student might remind her that Burke and Bolingbroke debated the merits of
parties. Her topic might then become an investigation and assessment of Burke’s defense
of parties. Or, from the same general interest, a student might become curious about the
relationship between political stability and party systems. He might wonder about how the
nature of the party system was connected to British stability and Italian instability since
World War II.
1
This, in fact, was exactly what one 2004 thesis at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign sought
to answer, and the conclusions received wide dissemination in the media. Ms. Devon Largio coded 1500
statements and stories and found that the administration originated 23 of 27 distinct arguments for going
to war. Moreover, she also found “that the Bush administration switched its focus from Osama bin Laden
to Saddam Hussein early on…, only ve months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks...” (Lynn 2004).
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 5
On the other hand, some topics are too specic or too personal or both. They lack
an awareness of the important general issues at stake in the experience of politics. You
might have wondered, for example, why some immigrant parents (including your own)
have developed strong loyalties to a certain political party, while others have not. To turn
this interest into a political science topic, you must situate the issue in a larger literature
(e.g., integration of immigrant groups into urban political machines, or rational choice
theory as applied to party choice, or studies of ethnic voting patterns, or contemporary
debates over multiculturalism and democratic theory, or perhaps classic discussions of
the functions and worth of political partisanship).What basic concerns do the writers in
these dierent literatures emphasize? Which ones most intrigue you? How might you
enter into a dialogue with these writers?
2. Identify a scholarly puzzle
As the above discussion suggests, rening your topic to something manageable
involves the further step of turning it into a research question. A question is not
simply a further narrowing of the topic. It transforms the topic into an unanswered but
answerable query. Another way to think about it may be to think of nding a puzzle
that inheres in the topic, a puzzle that intrigues, or would intrigue, political scientists
and that has occasioned debate in the eld. Other researchers may have addressed the
question, but they have not yet provided a fully satisfactory answer. Often, books or
articles end with a discussion of possible directions for future research—this is one
pointer toward good questions or puzzles.
Another way to look at formulating the question is to re-examine a previously posed
question which has a variety of answers. Then ask yourself if there is an analogous
question that one could ask that would add new information (we might call it “add-
ing more cases”). Alternatively, the analogous question could allow you to bridge a gap
between previously oered but diverging answers.
Formulating a research question also means deciding what kind of evidence you
would (ideally) like to produce to evaluate it. What is the method through which you
will solve the puzzle? Statistical/regression analysis? A comparison of case studies?
Analysis of legal cases? Textual analysis? Historical institutional analysis? Research in
archives? Content analysis? Experimental methods? Interviews? Survey data? Some
mixture of these?
Please note: All students who are conducting research involving human subjects (for
political science, this typically means conducting interviews, administering surveys, or
engaging in experiments) need to submit a “decision form” through the Undergraduate
Research Training Portal so that a determination can be made about whether or not
they need to submit an IRB application. However, you should be aware that under the very
specic directives governing the federal government’s denition of what actually
constitutes research, most undergraduate projects (up to and including senior theses) will
not require review by the IRB (also known as the Committee on the Use of Human
Subjects, or CUHS), as they are being undertaken for course credit (i.e., Gov 99) rather
than with the intent of producing “generalizable knowledge.” (See pg. 13 for more
information.)
In rening your topic, formulating a question, and deciding on an approach,
solicit feedback on your ideas by talking with friends, professors, teaching fellows, and
tutors. Where does it t into the subelds of political science? What literatures might be
relevant? How can you formulate a question that can be answered in the time available to
you? They may be able to suggest items to read or a person with whom to speak.
page 6 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
One last thought: Research requires a fair degree of exibility, especially as concerns your
topic and question. You will conduct better research if you remain exible with respect to
altering that question. Have you ever reached the end of a paper where you made an
argument and only then realized what it was you were really arguing? The same sort of
circumstance may arise in original research. As you pursue the research, you will likely
revisit the question and argument you have developed.
On the road to developing a thesis question: an example
Here’s an example of developing a researchable thesis question
whose answer might be of interest to your readers.
Step 1: Find a topic or area that interests you and begin to rene it.
Perhaps you are interested in the politics of same-sex marriage. You have taken a
couple of courses that deal with American government, policy, and social movements.
You have read a number of popular press articles, and perhaps some books, about same-
sex marriage. You have begun to wonder about the interconnections between the
GLBT civil rights movement and same-sex marriage policy across various U.S. states.
Step 2: Identify a puzzle or question
Beginning with the 2003 same-sex marriage case in Massachusetts, you decide you
are interested in how the case set a policy precedent for future same-sex marriage
litigation. But why should your answer be of interest to anyone beyond those
who study gay civil rights? You realize that the interest of your question would be
enhanced by situating it within a larger concern: the role of social movements
in creating court-led social policy. But now you see that you cannot simply look
at the GLBT movement; you will also need to consider the reaction to the case,
and counter-litigation by the Christian Right. Perhaps you also need to add an
additional case study; you could compare the same-sex marriage cases to early state-level
abortion litigation (from before Roe v. Wade). The question therefore becomes a
larger one about the role that social movements play in extracting policy consid-
eration and rulings from state-level courts. In doing this, you can demonstrate the
applicability of whatever ideas you come up with across some span of space and
time. Political scientists call this “portability.” You can engage the reader interested in
political phenomena, but perhaps uninformed about gay rights.
Do not let this example deceive you; a process such as the one just described can take
weeks, and a large amount of reading and talking with your adviser. It can be nebulous
and time-consuming, but it is extremely important because it will set the outer limits
of what you will spend the next few months examining in greater detail. You want to
nd the right balance between setting those limits too large or too small.
It is sometimes thought that political
theory theses are normative (they ask how
things “ought to be”), while theses in other
Government subelds are empirical (they ask
how or why things “are”). Yet this distinction
is misleading, in part because political theory
theses are not always aimed at answering a
normative question. For instance, a recent
thesis writer asked about the historical refer-
ents for Locke’s position on slavery and how a
recreation of this historical context (buttressed
by archival evidence) bears on the theoretical
contradictions that many commentators have
found in his texts. The aim of this thesis was thus
above all to explain and clarify, not to evaluate
whether Locke’s own normative position was
justied. It is also worth noting that while
theses in the American, Comparative, and IR
subelds tend not to begin with norma-
tive questions, such theses are often informed
to some degree by normative concerns. For
example, a thesis that tries to show how
voter registration laws in two states inuence
the rates of voting in those states may be mo-
tivated by certain normative commitments and
may gesture towards these commitments.
We can get a better sense of what political
theory theses tend to be about by distinguish-
ing among some broad types. First, some
theory theses are in fact focused narrowly on
normative questions, e.g., if human slavery
can be justied on utilitarian grounds, should
utilitarianism be rejected as an inadequate basis
for a theory of justice? Second, some political
theory theses do not aim to answer an “ought”
question, but rather aim to explain or clarify
our understanding of a political concept, idea,
or argument, or they seek to show how some
political phenomenon can be given greater
clarity through theoretical treatment. The the-
sis on Locke mentioned earlier would t under
this broad grouping. Finally, some theory theses
are motivated by both normative and empirical
(often historical) questions, e.g., can a consid-
eration of the classic debates among 18th and
19th century writers over the legitimacy of de
jure slavery illuminate the issue of whether new
forms of de facto slavery ought to be included
among contemporary crimes against humanity?
Finally, a word about methods: just as
thesis writers in other subelds have an
array of methods on which to draw, so too do
political theorists. It is probably obvious
that political theory theses often rely on
careful arguments about the canon of political
philosophy and the work of contempo-
rary political theorists, but they also regularly
make use of approaches from contemporary
philosophy, intellectual history, legal theory,
professional ethics, feminist and queer theory,
etc. Additionally, when empirical or histori-
cal considerations are part of their concern,
theory thesis writers also tend to draw
on methods employed in other areas of
political science. The diversity of approaches
possible in political theory theses attracts many
students, yet this same exibility brings with it the
challenge of deciding from among so many
options. The best approach is to be aware
of these choices, and to seek out advice
from members of the department, and in
particular your adviser, about what will work
best for you.
A Note on Normative
Questions and
Political Theory Theses
page 8 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
1.2 Library Research
Library research is crucial throughout the thesis project, not just when you are
collecting your data. To follow the steps discussed above—to move from that initial interest to
a more specic topic and, nally, on to your question—you will need to do reading and other
investigation. Your time in the library will help you ll in gaps in your knowledge, lead you
to further sources, and allow you to drill down more narrowly.
One of the necessary parts of both Gov 99: Senior Thesis Writers' Workshop (a course all
writers are required to take) and your thesis will be a review of the literature relevant to your
project. Good library work is an essential part of creating and writing the literature review.
Numerous undergraduates confess that Widener Library is an intimidating place, but you
must enter the belly of that beast in some fashion if you want to complete a thesis. Lamont
Library will likely have insucient resources for your topic, especially if you aim to do your
best on the thesis and do original research.
The Government Department has relationships with several reference librarians who are
particularly knowledgeable about the sources and library resources that political science
researchers use and need in their studies. If they do not know the answer to where you might
nd some source or type of information, they will help you gure it out.
Library portals
You may or may not be familiar with the various web portals for accessing Harvard’s
library resources. Here are just a few of them:
• The Harvard University Libraries main page (library.harvard.edu) is the entry point to library information
and services, HOLLIS+, article databases and other search tools. You can also request an appointment
with a Research Librarian from here.
• The Harvard College Libraries main page (hcl.harvard.edu) focuses on the student and researcher in the
FAS as the primary audience. To that end, it presents you with an increasingly detailed but generally
intuitive interface to the library system’s vast resources.
• HOLLIS+ (hollis.harvard.edu) is Harvard’s primary catalog of items owned or subscribed to by the
Harvard Library. From this catalog, you can find books, journal articles, images, maps, manuscripts
and more.
• If you use the Firefox web browser, Harvard has a great tool that integrates the catalogs of the library
system here with the browser itself, via a plugin. The Harvard Library LibX toolbar allows you to search
the HOLLIS+ catalog, the E-Journal List, the E-Resource List, Citation Linker, and Google Scholar.
2
LibX
will also put a little Harvard shield next to search results in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the New York
Times Book Review, and lots of other search resources that will lead you directly to the e-resource.
Finding Sources
In general, you will want to consult the most respected books and journals in the
eld. For journals, this includes American Political Science Review, International Organization,
and World Politics, along with more specialized regional or sub-eld publications. If you
2
One of the advantages of using Google Scholar from the Harvard Library LibX tool or through the
Databases page is that when Google Scholar comes up with an article or book or other resource, you will
also be provided a link to that source’s location in the catalog or database, so you can often link directly to
an article that Google Scholar mentions.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 9
are not sure which journals you should be paying most attention to, talk to your adviser
or reference librarian. You should also look at syllabi from past Gov classes you
have taken—which journals did your professors assign readings from most frequently?
• Search HOLLIS+. HOLLIS+ enables you to search for both books and journal articles. It may be helpful
to begin searching books and articles separately in HOLLIS+. Be aware that not all journal articles that
you can access as a Harvard student will be included in HOLLIS+.
When searching for books, you may want to start with some keyword searches and look for subject
headings, labeled “subjects” in HOLLIS+ records. Keyword searches limit you to exactly literal returns
that the database generates. Subject headings are more useful. Librarians link subjects to books based
on an understanding of the contents of the book. Finally, librarians have based the headings on codes
and standards set by the Library of Congress. They are standard across all research libraries in the United
States, and you can use them at libraries outside the Harvard system, such as the Boston Public Library,
other university libraries, and the Library of Congress itself. Learning the controlled vocabulary of subject
headings will soon lead you to browse all sorts of electronic (and non-electronic) catalogs more efficiently
than keywords and allow for any retracing of your steps you may need to do. But be aware that articles
tend to come out much more quickly than books, and it is thus in your best interest to consult journals for
the most cutting-edge research in the field, especially if your topic is time-sensitive.
• Search JSTOR via the Articles/Journals section of the Library Portal (lib.harvard.edu). Although it is
unlikely there are no books on your topic, there may be very few, and you may need to rely heavily
on articles. JSTOR attempts to index the top journals in the discipline. Please note that JSTOR does
not index the latest two to five years of the included journals. Also remember that all journals are not
indexed in JSTOR!
• Search Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, available via the Databases/E-resources link under
“Search & Find” on the main Harvard Library page (lib.harvard.edu). This resource indexes the journal
literature in political science and its related fields, including international relations, law, and public
administration and policy.
• Search Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) via the Articles/Journals section as well. This is a multi-
disciplinary resource providing access to some of the latest magazine, newspaper and scholarly journal
articles on your topic. But be aware that you will need to use discretion concerning which sources are
the most relevant to your project.
• Search the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). SSRN collects and disseminates social
science research. The SSRN eLibrary consists of a database containing abstracts on over 613,000
scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection which contains
over 500,000 downloadable full text pdf documents.
• Search ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (available through “All Databases" on lib.harvard.edu).
Have dissertations or master’s theses been written about your topic? If they have, and they did not
show up in your HOLLIS+ search, make sure to search the dissertation abstracts database. The full text
is available for most dissertations since 1997. If the full text is not available, you can request a copy via
Interlibrary Loan.
• Government Documents and Microforms Collections in Lamont Library is the central refer-
ence and referral point for government information from the United States government, 160 foreign
governments, and many international organizations. The collection is especially strong in demography
and population, history, international relations, and international trade.
• Search other journal indices and other government resources. The Harvard Libraries staff has
page 10 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
compiled an extensive set of electronic resources that should be of great interest to political research-
ers. From the main Harvard Library page, click on the “All Databases” link, and select browse by
subject to find all electronic resources in a subject area. Look at all the applicable resources here, but the
most relevant initial ones for your literature review will probably be the ”indexes to journal articles.”
• Ask a librarian! You can do this in a couple of ways. From the Harvard Library page there is a link to
send a message to a research librarian. Write a message that is as specific as possible, so the librarian
can be as helpful as possible. Or go directly to the Widener Reference Desk in the Atkins Reference
Room (on the second floor of Widener) or the Lamont Reference Desk on Level B in Lamont, where you
can get initial help and subsequent referrals.
• Request a research appointment with a research librarian who will provide advice on defining your
topic, developing your research strategy and locating and using subject-specific sources.
• Harvard Library Research Guides. These resources, created and maintained by Harvard librarians,
provide help with finding library materials, searching electronic and print collections, citing sources,
and more.
• Examine the bibliographies and reference lists of books, articles, and dissertations/theses that
you consult. You will be surprised at how many new sources you can find by examining the previous
research of other people.
• Once you have physically located resources in the library, make sure to look at materials located
proximate to the sources you found. One of the best things about the Library of Congress system is that
books on similar topics are shelved next to one another.
• Exhaust the Harvard catalogs before using search engines for the World Wide Web. Electronic re-
sources and library catalogs are set up for research purposes, while search engines have popularity and
commercial (advertising) interests as their organizational basis. Moreover, thousands of resources will
appear in Harvard catalogs that will either appear in a limited fashion or not at all on the Web.
Searching catalogs is not simply an administrative task that you must rush through as quickly
as possible so you can get on to “real work.” It is real work. Work in catalogs and search
resources constitutes the initial process of discovery; it can help you gure out how to pursue
the thesis you had in mind or lead you to a topic or twist on a topic you had not yet considered.
Finally, get to know one of the many citation tools currently available. Citation and research
management tools help you organize your research and keep track of your references. They
also make it easy to add citations into documents and automatically generate bibliographies.
Learning how to use one of these tools will save you hours of work on your bibliography
(guides.library.harvard.edu/cite).
Additional Resources
Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) also maintains a comprehensive
resource page for undergraduate researchers, with “information and tools for do-
ing research at any level.” While geared towards quantitative research, all thesis writ-
ers would potentially benet from taking a look at the resources presented, which
are broken up into common stages of research: nding resources, analyzing informa-
tion, writing up research, presenting research, and managing workow: bit.ly/1mb4fAu.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 11
1.3 Developing Your Project
After you have set your topic, written a research plan, and searched the library and its re-
sources extensively, you may nd yourself in the following place:
1. Other researchers have written extensively on a topic closely related — perhaps identical — to yours.
You say to yourself, “My topic must be really uninteresting, since so much work has been done on it.
How can I do research of my own if there is nothing for me to engage with?”
2. There is nothing written on your topic. You’ve found no books, articles, or dissertations on the topic.
You say to yourself, “My topic must be really uninteresting, since no one seems to have done any work
on it. How can I do research of my own if there is nothing for me to engage with?”
Both of these situations are great! Your approach to the topic will vary, depending on
which situation you nd yourself in. You might also be somewhere between the two
extremes, so the two sets of advice below will both have utility for you.
Been there, done that
If other researchers have covered your topic in such amazing detail that there does not seem
to be anything more that you can add to the conversation, do not worry. You’ve picked a topic
that has energized a number of other scholars, and the vitality of that engagement indicates that
your topic is viable. At the very least, the active nature of the scholarship should allow you to
track down the extant literature quite comprehensively; it’s unlikely you will miss something.
Tip # 1. Read books and articles with the most recent publication date rst. These are most
likely to cover the most recent developments in the scholarship, as well as to cite, summarize,
and review the recent literature considered most important.
Since the ultimate standard for a senior thesis is to make some contribution to the
scholarly literature of politics, you must nd some way to make your project dierent from
previously published work:
1. Revision. If you can examine previously overlooked sources or contribute new data, your analysis may
contribute to revising the standard understanding of the phenomenon or text you study.
2. Confirmation. Through your study, you may provide further confirmation of a general trend or
causal mechanism.
3. Complication. With the combination of overlooked sources, new data, and in-depth examination,
you can complicate an accepted generalization prevalent in the literature.
4. Adjudication. Where the literature is unclear as to the relative merits of one explanation or an
alternative, your examination will offer confirmation and support to one position or another.
As you compile a working bibliography of the relevant literature and begin to consider
which of the above strategies makes the most sense given your data or sources, consult
with your adviser and other teaching members of the department.
Tip # 2. Search journals for literature reviews, which will take the form of book re-
views, “state of the eld” essays, or even a history of how the topic has been studied.
A brief discussion with those familiar with the subject or approach can point you in the
direction of vital books and articles. It is not necessary to read everything written on your
topic, especially if it is a well-covered topic.
page 12 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
Ex nihilo
It can be quite intimidating to realize that the thesis topic you propose does not seem
to exist in the literature. As you have written papers in the past, you could always nd
something if you dug long enough and deep enough. So now what?
As Bobby McFerrin said many years ago,“Don’t worry, be happy.” Almost by denition,
the work that you do will make a contribution to the scholarly literature on your topic.
Somehow, you have found a new twist on a puzzle that scores of other researchers have
overlooked or ignored. While your friends and fellow government thesis writers work to
nd something “new” to say, you have a grand vista in front of you.
You will have to be more creative, both in situating your topic and developing your
question or puzzle. To make your arguments and evidence sing for other researchers, you will
need to situate your project in extant bodies of political research. Here are some practical
suggestions for how you may do this.
First, summarize the topic. Get the topic down to one sentence of 25 words or fewer. No
exceptions! If you cannot speak simply of the subject matter, you need to get a better grasp
on it. The summary can then point you toward the more general import of the particular
cases or problems.
Second, situate your research theoretically. It is extremely likely that even if the particular
subject or circumstance that you want to investigate is new to political science, the theory
or explanation you employ will come from some larger body of literature. If, for example,
you are interested in the ways that countries formulate their armed forces’ health and social
policies, you might employ principal-agent theory (which is often used in other areas of
political research). In this case, there is a large body of literature in International Relations
and Comparative Politics that employs principal-agent theory, and you can draw on these
theoretical approaches to shape your initial answers to the puzzle of why some states have
social service provisions for their military that do or do not align with the levels they oer
to society at large. In essence, you must learn to think analogically from one set of topics to
another, looking for similarities and noting pertinent dierences, so that you can formulate
appropriate explanations.
Third, you can oer tentative answers to your puzzle (hypotheses).This will allow you to
test the plausibility of the answers you try out (because sometimes things look more or less
reasonable when you put them down in writing). Moreover, it will also point you toward
the more general aspects of your problem, pointing to the theoretical angle you may want to
take and aligning you with a larger body of literature (even one somewhat “far” from your
topic) on which to hang your explanation. Tentative answers suggest ways to “read around
your topic.”There might not be a vast literature on military social service provision, but there
is certainly a large literature on how military policies of other sorts are made, how states
and societies decide how much social service provision to oer their members, and civil-
military relations. By situating yourself in these larger literatures, you open your analysis to a
wider range of scholars. You will also open yourself up to a larger set of possible explanatory
solutions to your own puzzle. The process works in both directions, for as you open up to a
larger audience, you will see a corresponding opening of your own options.
1.4 The Literature Review
Your thesis does not exist in a vacuum—or it should not. The question you ask comes from
somewhere and it has some context. But your reader probably does not know how your research
question relates to previous political science studies. What similar questions have others asked
before? What were the answers? What contribution to the dialogue will you make? It is up to
you to explain this to the reader. You must situate yourself in a larger literature.
The literature review not only contextualizes the work you will do, but it also shows the
reader the special contribution you make to the study of politics. Your thesis should not
A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Government | page 13
Human Subjects Research
and Writing the Thesis
All students planning to conduct research involving human subjects, no matter
how seemingly innocuous, are required to submit a decision form through the
Undergraduate Research Training Portal (cuhs.harvard.edu/urtp-portal) so that a
determination can be made about whether or not they need to apply for formal approval
from Harvard’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). Please note that under the very specific directives
governing the federal government’s definition of what actually constitutes research, most senior thesis projects
are not expected to require review by the IRB (also known as the Committee on the Use of Human
Subjects, or CUHS).
In order to submit a decision form, students need to have a well-formulated
methodology and be able to identify who will be studied, where the study will take place, how
subjects will be recruited, what will be asked of them, and what measures will be
taken to protect confidentiality. Students will also need to have completed the CUHS-led
undergraduate training workshop or an online human subjects training (CITI or NIH, both of which are
available on the CUHS website).
Government students should consult with the Assistant Director of
have any questions about how to fill out the decision form. They should also list him as their
secondary advisor so that he will be notified once a determination has been made.
Be aware that undergraduates receiving funding from the University are not allowed to
conduct research in regions that are deemed “high risk” by Harvard’s Global Support Services
(GSS) office. Undergraduates conducting research in locations deemed “elevated risk” by GSS
will be required to consult with the GSS Travel Safety and Security team.
Projects not requiring CUHS approval that could still potentially do harm:
Each year, a small number of College students conduct research that is determined not to
need IRB/CUHS approval but that nonetheless has the potential to put the student or the
research subjects at risk. Harvard has an institutional obligation to take reasonable steps to
reduce risks for the student and the research subjects. As such, students in this category will
need to meet with a representative from the Office of Undergraduate Research and
Fellowships (URAF) to discuss their research. If you have been told or believe your project
falls into this category, please make an appointment with the Dept.’s ADUS
([email protected]) to discuss the matter.
Student projects that do need CUHS review:
Students required to submit a formal CUHS application need a “faculty
sponsor” (usually this is your primary thesis adviser; note that all ladder [i.e., tenured or tenure-
track] faculty, as well as senior lecturers and some lecturers who have received an advising
waiver are eligible to serve as faculty sponsors provided they have completed the CITI or
NIH ethics training). If your thesis adviser is an ineligible lecturer or a Ph.D. candidate, please
contact the Dept.’s ADUS ([email protected]) for information on how to proceed.
Be advised that even an expedited review process may require several weeks. In those
exceptional cases where full IRB review is needed, this process may take a month or more to
complete. Plan accordingly!
cover ground that others have trod before you; you need to nd some understudied corner
of politics and explore it.
Once you have conducted your searches and think you have a handle on what
exists on your topic, you must then synthesize it. What this means is that you should
lter the sources that you have found through the question you want to answer.
Don’t make lists of the sources and then engage in aimless summary of those sources.
Not all sources will be equally interesting vis-à-vis your question, so there is no need
(or time) to devote equal space or importance to each. Instead, with each source,
ask yourself, “How is this relevant to my question?” You will nd yourself
summarizing the work of others, but that summary should be subordinate to your concerns.
1.5 Checking Your Progress
E pur si muove. (And still it moves.)
- Galileo Galilei
The senior thesis can feel as if it drags on interminably, with little or no progress that you
can see. You have a year-long task ahead of you, and although it will move slowly, you want
to make sure that it does indeed move. Just as you cannot do all of the research and writing
in the nal few weeks you have in the Spring term, you cannot get everything done in the
rst weeks of the Fall term.
The thesis process is a new one to you, and so one of the best ways to assess your progress
on the thesis is to draw on your experience writing all sorts of research papers during your
time at Harvard. This section of the handbook will highlight some of those similarities, as
a way of helping you to assess where you are and where you need to go; in addition, it will
introduce some other techniques for helping you chart your progress.
Be sure to try the following techniques from the beginning of the thesis process. You may
not be able to complete them as exercises, but that’s perfectly ne. The answers you do come
up with will chart your progress thus far. The amount of each exercise that you can complete
will indicate what your next step should be.
The “cocktail party” answer
In Cambridge, England, the antecedent of our own fair city, there is a large park called
Parker’s Piece. Just south of John Harvard’s own college, Emmanuel, this large expanse of
grass has no trees or other vertical encumbrances. However, since at least the advent of gas
lighting in cities, at the center of Parker’s Piece, where two paths across the Piece come
together, there stands a light-post. When confused about their research, generations of
graduate and undergraduate students have been advised to go explain their thesis topics to
the light-post on Parker’s Piece. The idea is that since the light xture is mute, the student
stands naked before his project and the light’s muteness forces the student to speak simply,
succinctly, and sensibly.
Here at Harvard and other American universities, we have our own version of that
tradition. It is called the “cocktail-party” answer or the “elevator-ride” answer. Imagine you
are at a cocktail party or riding in an elevator and you meet a casual acquaintance. The
person knows you are working on a thesis of some sort, but she does not necessarily have
an abiding interest in the topic. (An even more strenuous version of this test posits that the
interlocutor may just be polite, rather than interested.) After a quick salutation, she asks
you,“So what is your thesis about?”
Stop. Can you answer that question in three short and simple sentences? Why or why not?
page 14 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 15
Whether you are addressing the light on Parker’s Piece or formulating your cocktail-party
answer, the underlying motive is still the same: ideas that you have developed well should be
easy to state and understand. If you cannot do this, your idea and argument need further re-
nement. You and your idea are not an exception to this rule. We can express the greatest ideas
in human history in this simple fashion. For example, let’s look at some arguments you have
seen before, in their own words. What would the cocktail-party summaries be for:
1.…The Declaration of Independence? The King and Parliament of England have violated our rights as
Englishmen. The most sacred of those rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We state this
so that it is clear why we fight against our countrymen.
2.…Machiavelli’s Prince? For a republic to survive, it needs a strong prince who knows himself well to
guide it. His means may be harsh, but they are geared toward the survival of the polity, which is the
highest good.
3.…The Communist Manifesto? The central organizing principle of modern social life is the
relationship between the people who produce things and those who own the means of production,
and everything derives from that. This arrangement contains the seed of its own destruction. That
destruction will bring about the end of individual and private ownership and usher in an era of corporate
control of all social and material resources.
Sure, there are many more details, and one might highlight dierent parts of each
argument made in these political texts. But the essence of each exists in these cocktail
answers. You must strive for the same in your own research.
The Three Thesis Tricks
Another way to assess your progress on the thesis starts with the very basics of your
project. Your rst goal is to move beyond simply having a thesis topic to arriving at a place
where you can articulate the central question that makes your thesis unique. One method
requires that you perform the three “thesis tricks” once a month. These will help you to
anchor your work and self-diagnose your direction and progress.
1. Summarize and describe your puzzle in three sentences.
2. Raise three analytic or methodological questions about your topic.
3. Cite three means by which you will attempt to answer those questions. These can be data sources,
a particular methodology by which you will arrive at an answer, or the solution to a methodological
problem you have encountered.
If these seem daunting, you will want to speak with your thesis adviser and Gov 99
seminar leader as soon as you can. It will be particularly dicult to start down a research path
if you cannot identify a topic, a set of questions, and a means by which to answer them.
Your thesis tricks will look dierent in September than they will in December or March.
This is normal as your thesis evolves and develops. It is all part of the process of research and
one of the factors that keep research fresh. Follow the alternatives that open up as you engage in
your research, analysis, reading, advising, and writing. Soon enough, you will begin to be able to
justify why it is that someone should spend a day reading and understanding your argument.
3
Do these once a month, at least. You can use the daily writing time we suggest in
the following chapter to do these, or you can perform them reciprocally for your
thesis-writing friends.
3
The average thesis takes up to a day to read, digest, and write signicant comments upon.
1.6 Working With Your Adviser
After you have found an adviser and returned to campus, the rst task you need to
complete with your adviser is to set a schedule to budget your time. This shows you and
your adviser that you are serious about the task ahead of you, and it will help you to assess
realistically the amount of time that you have for other activities vis-à-vis your thesis work.
Your adviser, having research experience him or herself, can help you to assess whether the
time goals you set are realistic.
The key to a good relationship with your adviser is regular, forthright, and clear
communication—by both parties. You and your adviser must have regular meetings,
although the frequency of these meetings will vary over the course of the year and from
student to student. It is almost always a good idea to schedule your next meeting before you
leave any meeting.
You should be clear with your adviser from the very beginning and over the year about
your needs and expectations. The thesis is your project and you must drive it. Your adviser is
an ally and a resource, but this is your project. Past seniors have commented:
• My adviser was awesome, spectacular, amazing. Never had so much help in my life.
• A real disappointment. I was happy at first to get him since he’s so famous, and I thought I’d get a good
theoretical grounding. But he was so terse. Once I turned in 30 pages, which had taken me a month to
write, and he had maybe 6 or 8 minutes of comments. I really tried to draw on his knowledge but found
it impossible. I can’t even see him if I don’t get an appointment 3 weeks in advance.
• Once I began writing, our meetings were much more frequent. Although very busy and often out-of-
town, my adviser was always available — as long as I asked to be seen, I had no trouble scheduling
appointments. He read all my drafts by our next meeting.
• If you are at all shy or unsure of yourself, your adviser must be someone you’re absolutely confident
with. I had immense respect for my adviser, but I was also afraid of her (especially when I had problems)
until it was all over. I almost never asked her anything — my loss.
Written communication is particularly important. Work on your prospectus and chapter
drafts should begin early enough to go through several drafts, each one beneting from your
adviser’s comments. Give a draft chapter to your adviser as soon as you nish it, but make
sure that you do not simply hand your adviser an agglomeration of pieces and parts without
much relation, hoping that your adviser will x things or gure out your argument for you.
He or she will not.
In addition, the peer review feedback you receive in Gov 99 will help to improve the
substance of the material that you send to your adviser. Once you have discussed a draft
chapter with your peers and received their comments in Gov 99, you can discuss these
comments with your adviser. The suggestions that your peers provide may cause you to alter
the structure, content, or approach of your thesis, and you would do well to discuss such
plans with your adviser.
An important caution: do not walk away from the peer-review thinking that you will
need to re-conceptualize your thesis or engage in the research process entirely anew. This is
another way in which your adviser can help you. You know your topic better than (almost)
anyone, and your adviser can help you to contextualize that knowledge and show you how,
even if your chapters need improvement, they still demonstrate your knowledge and the
potential contribution you may make to our understanding of your topic and to politics
more generally.
page 16 | Getting Started: About Topics, Research Questions and Thesis Research
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 17
chapter two
Writing the Thesis
2.1 On Writing, Thinking, and the Senior Thesis
Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.
- Douglas Adams
Up to this point in your education, writing has primarily been a process of creating
nished products—or, at the very least, near-nished products. In the ideal, of course, you
have produced multiple drafts of term papers and other class projects. In reality, if you began
writing in advance of the night before the assignment was due, you are probably ahead of
most of your peers here at Harvard College.
In the senior thesis, however, there really is no “night before.” The duration and length of
the project allow you to use your writing to gure out the ideas in the thesis. Put simply, it
is hard to know what your questions and their potential answers are until you have written
about them both. You will not be able to learn what your thesis has to teach us until you have
learned a few things by writing.
You have probably received encouragement from your professors and teaching fellows to
work in the following manner: do the research, gure out your argument, esh out the de-
tails, and plan the writing, perhaps even from a detailed outline. The thesis process, however,
will change your relationship to writing. Writing—really writing—a senior thesis will teach
you about the beautiful and intricate relationship between ideas and their expression. You
will learn that good writing lies in revision, because the rst draft (almost) never produces
the nal understanding of your ideas. You will learn that you may need to write ten or more
pages that do not really capture your meaning, that do not quite go where you think your
ideas and evidence really lead. Then you must throw those away and write ten good pages
that better express what you meant to say.
You can start writing anywhere in the maze of ideas and phrases that run through your
head. In fact, there is no other way to do it. You avoid writer’s block by not constraining
yourself to the mistaken idea that the thesis has to emerge in a linear fashion from your brain,
beginning with the beginning and ending at the end. The rst sentence of the rst chapter
is NOT the place to start. Everything will come together in the proper order at the end of
the process (this is a form of revision, too!).
If you have chosen your topic well, then writing a thesis will be an experience of
discovery, pleasing beyond anything else you have done so far. This does not mean that it
will always be fun, entertaining, or relaxing. Virtually every professional writer will tell you
that writing is the absolute hardest thing she or he does. Writing a senior thesis is a wonder-
ful, terrible test of yourself, and the rewards are almost entirely personal. There is no other
undergraduate experience like it.
Finally, remember, above all, that as the deadline approaches, a good thesis is a nished
thesis. This is not your life’s work. Write the best thesis you can in the time allotted and do
not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
page 18 | Writing the Thesis
Keeping a Journal
One of the most eective ways to get an extraordinarily large amount of writing done
without realizing it is to keep a research journal. This works rather similarly to the idea
of keeping a diary or journal of your personal life. Each day, you commit to writing a
certain amount of time or a certain number of pages (20 minutes or 2–3 pages are a good
start). And then you write whatever comes into your head regarding your thesis topic, no
matter how frivolous, ridiculous, or odd it seems. The point is not to make sense or produce
anything that will show up in your thesis—the point is get you thinking about your topic
and evidence on a regular basis.
This can provide you with several benets.
• First, it is actual work.
Many of you may become concerned (or even obsessed) with the amount of work you are putting in
on your thesis. You may feel like you’re not doing “enough” or that everyone else is working more than
you are. But be assured that this small 20 minutes constitutes significant work. It forces you to sit down
and think about the thesis, even if it’s just writing down a collection of random thoughts you have been
having about various parts and pieces of the work. And you will be surprised as you go along how your
journal sessions will often extend beyond the minimum goal you set for yourself.
• It provides you an out when you need it.
There will be days when you do not want to work on your thesis, no matter how much you need to. A
small amount of journal work may be all that you do that day. Since it is just 20 minutes, you only have
to push yourself for that short period of time. Thus, you do something everyday.
• It provides a bit of a check on the thesis process.
You may have heard the expression, attributed to Otto von Bismarck, “Laws are like sausages. It’s better
not to see them made.” The thesis process is quite similar. It’s sloppy, and all sorts of things get shoved
in. By keeping a journal, you have a place to put all the various stuff that might otherwise end up in
the thesis. And unlike a sausage (and remaining neutral on similarities to laws), the thesis that contains
all your ingredients without judicious mixing and shaping will be messy and indigestible. Please do not
assume that everything that you write must or even should go into a finished work. The journal provides
a way to do your sausage-making behind the scenes.
How you logistically go about keeping your thesis journal is up to you. Many of you
may be inclined to do all of this work on your computer, and that method might be the
best for you. But please do consider the pen-and-paper route, and not just because it is a
technology that has existed for centuries and served scores of generations of researchers before
you. More than that, pen and paper seem less like producing a nished work than computer
writing does—on the computer, you will often spend time futzing with formatting or other
non-necessary aspects of your diary, so that everything “looks right.” With paper, there’s little
chance that your mind will even sub-consciously slip into thinking that what you are writing
will be for production of any sort. On paper with pen, everything is a draft, and it may free you
from the problem of worrying what anyone else will think about what you’re writing.
Writing it bird-by-bird
By this point, you may be feeling just a tad overwhelmed by the prospect of 100 pages
of prose, initially covering the broad range of work that others have done and staking a
claim to your own piece of that work, laying out a coherent social science theory of
cause and eect, and verifying it by convincing and well-presented evidence. If you
don’t, you soon will. When Luke Skywalker told Yoda that he was unafraid of Jedi training,
Yoda replied,“You will be. You will be.”
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 19
The author and essayist Anne Lamott described the writing life in her book Bird By Bird
(1995) and she related the story of how she keeps from feeling overwhelmed at the thought
of writing a whole book.
… [T]hirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to
get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next
day. … [H]e was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils
and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the tasks ahead. Then my
father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said,“Bird by bird,
buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” (18 .)
The only way you will get through your thesis is bird-by-bird. What follows are some
ways to attack particular birds and to make sure you cover each bird in some form.
“The s&*##y rst draft”
Lamott also talks about the awful rst draft. You have permission to write badly on the rst
draft, because it is the only way you will ever get anything on paper.
… People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe
even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a mil-
lion dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story
they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few
times to get the cricks out, and dive in typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this
is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beauti-
fully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down feeling wildly enthusiastic
and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.…. Very few writers really know what they
are doing until they have done it.
Lamott points out that you cannot know what you will get from your writing until you
do it; you cannot plan your brilliant moments, good ideas, or bad passages. They simply
happen. “There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six
that you just love, …. but there was no way to get to this without rst getting through the
rst ve and a half pages.”
So what should you write when you’ve sat down to “do some writing?” Anything that
comes into your head. The rst draft is something of a mental explosion onto the paper or
screen. It’s supposed to look awful. Don’t worry, because you’re not going to show that to a
person anyway (and if you do, we certainly hope the person comes back and tells you that
you can do better).We are all better writers than our rst drafts would indicate.
If there is nothing else that you learn from the senior thesis experience, we hope you
learn that writing is about process and not the nal production. You certainly will achieve
something in the end, but that product can only come about through a process that begins
with the crazy, foolish, and half-baked.
“Chunks”
Your thesis will not emerge in anything like the order it will actually end up in. Chapters
will not emerge in anything like the order they end up in. Nothing will emerge in order. As
we have emphasized many times over, the thesis is messy, and part of the academic task is to
impose order on it all.
But you are not necessarily there yet. You must rst get the material out, and then you, in con-
sultation with your adviser, can gure out what will make the most sense to present your results.
One time-honored strategy for writing long pieces of prose is to write in “chunks.”
Often, you will know that some bit of the thesis, somewhere in the middle, needs to be
written down. (You might even hear the phrasing in your head as you go about doing other
things.) But the writing process you have probably done so far has encouraged you to write
documents from start to nish, in the “proper order.” So while you may know that a particu-
lar piece that you need to write must be written, you also know that it’s not the rst part of
the work. No matter—write it down anyway. You can always put it in the right place later.
Perhaps even more importantly, there will be times when you know that there are
various bits to be written—perhaps a few paragraphs on methodology or on a small part of your
theory or literature review—but you don’t know how they t together. Again, just write them
down. If you are keeping a research journal, you can write them down in the journal during
your daily writing time. Or open a document on your computer and write two paragraphs.
The important element here is not to be afraid of having lots of dierent little chunks of
writing. Just keep track of them so that you can nd them later. One particularly good way
to do this is to print them out, place each in a folder for “Chunks,” and keep that folder in
a safe place. Then, when you’re ready to begin using some of these writing chunks, you can
begin to arrange them in an order, simply by reshuing the sheets of paper.
As we have emphasized over and over, the one activity you must engage in when you are
an active writer trying to do your best work is to be constantly aware of the opportunities
and fortuities that come up. The ction writer John Gregory Dunne (essayist Joan Didion’s
husband and columnist Dominick Dunne’s brother) noted that a writer must not depend
upon inspiration to strike if he wants to get work done, but he should always be prepared for
ideas to simply pop up. He had personalized note cards that he always carried in his jacket
pocket with a pen, so that he could write down ideas, quotes, phrases, and whatever else
struck him. It’s likely that like most of us who write, he threw away a considerable number
of those ideas, but he always had them when he needed them later. So go to the stationery
store, get a notebook that you like, and start carrying it with you wherever you go.
page 20 | Writing the Thesis
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 21
Some Additional Resources
Books on Research and Writing
There are several books we recommend to you. These are all widely available, and they
contain dierent sorts of advice on how you can go about doing what you need to do to
combine the process of research and writing.
Turabian, Kate L. 2013. A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations: Chicago
style for students and researchers. 8th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Possibly the sine qua non of helpful thesis books (besides the one you hold in your hand
right now).The Turabian guide contains extensive information about all formatting matters,
whether you use a humanities (footnote and bibliography) style or a social science (in-text
references and reference list) style. Want to know how to format the UN document you cite?
Should you place a comma before the nal item in a serial list? How should a table or gure
be placed in a text? Turabian can tell you how.
Moreover, the newest edition also contains extensive advice on how to formulate, plan,
execute, and complete a research project just like the one you are working on. All for $18 or
less. If you plan to go on to almost any sort of graduate education (and since you are writing
a thesis, that may be a real possibility), this will be one of the best investments you make. For
even more info, see turabian.org.
Becker, Howard Saul, and Pamela Richards. 2007. Writing for social scientists: How to start and
nish your thesis, book, or article. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Though aimed at graduate students, this book covers many of the topics and concepts of
interest to senior thesis writers as well. Primarily, it seeks to make the writing itself better,
training you to focus on editing, how sentences ow together, taking risks, and establishing
the right tone.
Lamott, Anne. 1995. Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. 1st ed. New York: Anchor Books.
A colloquially written guide to the writing life. An easy read that reassures you that
writing is hard, that writers are often lazy, unproductive, uncreative, and must simply keep
plugging away to get it. Lamott teaches in a very concrete way: writing is like taking
Polaroid pictures or making a school lunch. Moreover, she’s probably got way more insecuri-
ties and neuroses than you do. This book will help you to relate the writing you are doing
to some concrete reality, in the attempt to make the ideas easier to understand and the ways
you express them more vivid.
Zinsser, William Knowlton. 2006. On writing well: The classic guide to writing non-ction. 30th
anniversary ed. New York: HarperCollins.
Another classic. Zinsser shows you how he goes through his own process, including
markup from various drafts of the book itself. He addresses various forms of writing,
including interviews, science and technology writing (which you may nd more useful than
you realize), and criticism (especially helpful if you are working in political theory). He also
oers advice about navigating audience, reducing “clutter,” and learning to trust your
material. Quick, informal, and another must-have.
Note that we have not included either the Chicago Manual of Style or Strunk and
White’s Elements of Style. Although these are good books, the Chicago Manual will prove less
useful to you than the Turabian, and the Strunk and White is probably on your shelf already.
Moreover, Strunk and White, although practically a necessity if you want to write beautiful
English prose, often seems a tad idiosyncratic and does not provide as full a course in the
process of writing and research as do these other books.
Online resources
There are a number of resources that can help you with your writing available online.
Here are just a few.
First, since we did not recommend The Elements of Style or the Chicago Manual of Style in
book form, you should know that each is available online.
Strunk (1918) is the original version of the work, and it is in the public domain.
Subsequent editions are still under copyright and not available online. That said, the heart
of the advice that generations of students have come to rely upon comes from the original
version. Click on bartleby.com/141 for a quick look.
The Chicago Manual of Style (often simply called the CMS) has a home page at
chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html. Some of the material is only available via a subscrip-
tion, but Harvard does have a general one. There is basic information on citation styles at
chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.
The Harvard Writing Center (writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu) provides comments on
the argument, form, organization, and presentation of your drafts and you can schedule a
meeting with a writing tutor who can help you with all of these. Each year the Writing
Center also pairs thesis writers with specially trained senior thesis tutors. Further informa-
tion on senior thesis tutors is available on the Writing Center Web Site. (Note that several of
the Harvard Houses employ resident or non-resident writing tutors who are available to
work with senior thesis writers. Check with your Resident Dean to see if your house has a
writing tutor.)
Outside of Harvard, one of the very best college writing centers is at Purdue
University (owl.english.purdue.edu). Almost any question you have—whether on cita-
tions, formatting, avoiding plagiarism, writer’s block, use of appropriate language, and source
evaluation—has a resource at this site.
5
Well worth your time and use.
5
These are particularly good, and we recommend these to you whether you have writer’s block or even
mild writer’s congestion. The specic page is at owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/567/01.
page 22 | Writing the Thesis
A Note on Plagiarism and
Collaboration
The College recognizes that the open exchange of ideas plays a vital role in the academic endeavor, as often it is
only through discussion with others that one is fully able to process information or to crystallize an elusive concept.
Therefore, students are encouraged to engage in conversations with their teachers and classmates regarding their
thesis research; this is one of the primary reasons for requiring senior thesis writers to take Gov 99, the Senior Thesis
Writers’ Workshop. At the same time, it is important for all scholars to acknowledge clearly when they have relied
upon or incorporated the ideas of others.
It is expected that the senior thesis will be the student’s own work. Writers should always take great care to distinguish their
original concepts from information derived from sources. The term “sources” includes not only primary and secondary material pub-
lished in print or online, but also information and opinions gained directly from other people. Quotations must be placed properly
within quotation marks and must be cited fully. In addition, all paraphrased material (i.e., material restated in another form or using
other words, but substantially the same as in the source) must be acknowledged completely. Whenever ideas or facts are derived from
a student’s reading and research (or even from their own writing), the sources must be clearly indicated.
Students must also comply with the policy on collaboration established for each course and/or project. The
Government Department permits no collaboration in the researching or writing of the senior thesis. However, we are
aware that thesis writers occasionally nd themselves part of larger data-gathering eorts (e.g., they work as research
assistants on a project directed by a Harvard faculty member) and may want to incorporate the data collected into the
thesis. If this applies to you, you will need to ask for prior written permission from the project head; if granted, this
documentation should be submitted to the Undergraduate Program Oce.
Students who, irrespective of reason, submit work either not their own or lacking clear source attribution will be
subject to disciplinary action, up to and including being required to withdraw from the College. The responsibility
for learning the proper forms of citation lies with the individual student (see Chap. 4: Formatting, Submitting, and
Grading for further information). If you are in any doubt about what is permissible and what is not in academic work,
you should consult your thesis adviser, Gov 99 TF, and/or Resident Dean.
Inclusion of Prior Work in the Thesis
It is the expectation that all work submitted for a course or for any other academic reason at Harvard will
have been done solely for that purpose. Nonetheless, we realize that the thesis project often evolves out of prior
papers you have written/courses you have taken (e.g., you write a paper for a junior seminar and later want to
incorporate it or parts of it in your thesis). It is permissible to use this earlier work, or portions thereof, provided you
obtain the prior written permission of all the instructors involved and consult with your Resident Dean (information on
this policy may be found in the Harvard College’s Student Handbook. A student who utilizes earlier work as
part of the thesis without prior permission will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including being required
to withdraw from the College.
Students with questions are urged to consult the Undergraduate Program Oce concerning this important matter.
Term Paper Companies
In keeping with the principle that all material submitted for the thesis should be the student’s independent work,
any undergraduate who makes use of the services of a commercial term paper company is liable to disciplinary action.
(N.B. Students who sell their academic work [including translations], or who are employed by a term paper company,
are similarly liable and may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including being required to withdraw from
the College.)
2.2 Completing a Government Senior Thesis:
Useful Strategies
Remember your audience
Your senior thesis should be addressed to its readers: teaching members of the
Government Department who are knowledgeable in the general eld of the thesis, but who
have not advised it. Assume that your readers are well informed about and interested in the
broader issues of your topic but not experts in its specics or the information you have
collected, and that they are benignly skeptical about your project. Your readers’ background
means that you will not need to spell out in great detail those basic facts, ideas, and theories
that are known to everyone in the eld.
6
This does not mean, however, that your readers
know anything about you or your individual thesis, about what you are trying to do, about
the question you ask, why you are asking it, or how you intend to answer it. You must thus
provide a full and developed introduction to explain to the readers what you do and why.
By March, thesis writers’ views of their work are hardly impartial—blindly aectionate
might be a better description. Writers in love frequently omit the basic explanations and
justication needed to win over their readers, and the writers lose the struggle to per-
suade before they have even begun. Highlighting the details of the research tends to be the focus of
the writer, but readers generally care less for those specic cases and arguments than for their larger
implications. Tell your reader what everything you have done means for the study of politics or
political life. Social science readers are less interested in the unique than the universal—they
actually want to know why the study is not unique. From the readers’ perspective, a thesis is
not about facts—they will trust you to get those right—but about theories and conclusions.
7
Be clear about your ambitions
Ambition is the product of the rst stage of thesis writing: the selection of a top-
ic and denition of a question worthy of study. In the thesis, ambition becomes most
evident in the introduction, conclusion, and bibliography. These three portions generally
prove quite revealing. The introduction and conclusion not only reveal what the writer is
trying to do, but also whether it is being done properly and with what degree of insight. The
reader examines the bibliography—usually during the reading of the substantive chapters—
to see what is missing. The reader wishes to know whether you have overlooked some
portion of the literature relevant to your argument. The reader will often form an
impression as to your ambition based on these three sections. Therefore, it is not wise to
sweat over the body of the thesis and then content yourself with a hasty introduction and
conclusion tacked onto the work at the last minute. Similarly, your bibliography should indi-
cate your careful coverage of the research literature, and you can do this by making sure that
the bibliography is neat, thorough, and conforms to a standard style of research referencing.
Follow through
Execution is what thesis writers normally think of as making a good thesis. Execution
is the product of all the research and writing that occurs after the topic and question are
6
Be careful that you yourself know what that pool of common knowledge is. You should make it clear, at
the very least via a bibliographic footnote, that you also know who and what is in that common pool.
7
Always remember, however, that readers can and do believe in Ronald Reagan’s old adage: “Trust, but
verify.” Even if they trust you, they will expect that you provide the evidence to allow them to verify the
claims you make about that evidence.
page 24 | Writing the Thesis
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 25
settled. Execution is important, but the best execution will not save a poorly conceived
project. Senior thesis writers will often think that the real work of the thesis takes place in
the execution phase, and they devote insucient attention to grounding the project
appropriately. Execution also applies to matters of style and proong. A thesis riddled with
spelling, grammatical, typographical, and other errors will not succeed. This occurs not because
readers are attempting to be picky or enforce capricious and arbitrary standards, but
because the quality of your expression and execution is directly proportional to the quality of
your thought. If poor execution constantly distracts or confuses your reader, the reader will
assume that you were at least as distracted or confused yourself. Don’t rely blindly on
spell-checking or grammar software (which is often wrong or inappropriately set). Do not
assume that a wordprocessor’s auto-formatting functions will function correctly. Check your
work carefully! Have other impartial readers look it over as well (but give them sucient
time to do a good job, too).
Maintain your momentum
At some point in the writing stage, you will begin to feel stuck or lost. Everyone struggles
through complex passages, loses track of the central argument in a chapter, or faces other
obstacles that arise because the writing process is a thinking process above all. So here are
some suggestions for strategies to maintain your writing momentum even when it feels like
everything is grinding to a halt.
• Stick to a schedule
As we indicated at the beginning of this chapter, you should be writing from the beginning of the pro-
cess. There will come a point, however, when you say to yourself, “I need to start the formal first draft
of this chapter on Monday.” Next step? Start the chapter on Monday! You may not be ready, but one
is never ready to start writing. You could read one more book, one more article, one more dataset. But
this will always be the case. When you reach the point where you must begin writing, more research
often proves a hindrance as much as a help. You never thought you could get to a point where research
becomes a procrastination technique, but here you are.
You must set a certain number of hours every day where you simply write. Write at the same time
each day. Create a routine that makes it as easy as possible to fall into the writing and minimize the
opportunity to avoid your writing.
• Keep track of the hours you spend at the computer working on your thesis. Even when those
hours prove “unproductive” on some days, they do add up to completed drafts. But don’t expect your-
self to sit in front of the screen all day or night. (Ask your thesis adviser how many hours a day he or
she can write. You may be surprised to hear that it is only about three or four. Writing is difficult work,
and you can’t sustain it indefinitely without rest.)
• Stay at your writing location, even if you type nothing that whole time. There are those days
when you cannot get more than a couple of paragraphs written in the course of three or four hours.
Those days are still days when you are at work. But if you get up from your desk or table or wherever
you write, you lose the focus your mental processes need to put your ideas together. Sometimes nothing
will come out; your brain has not taken a vacation, it’s just working very quietly. But those days can be
followed by days where the prose comes so abundantly and so fast that you have little idea where it all
comes from.
• Count only that time spent in front of the keyboard writing when you are tallying the hours you
spend writing, even if the results are extremely short. Do not count those times you are tracking down
books or reading articles.
• Work in units of time. Some people work well using “units.” In this method, you set yourself a timer
for 50 minutes of work, and you stay in your writing program for the entire duration. When the 50
minutes are up, you take a ten-minute break to surf the internet, get a cup of coffee, walk around the
block, or whatever will be something pleasant for a reward. When the 10 minutes (and no more!) are
done, go back and repeat. Do this three or four times per day.
• Avoid being overly critical as you write because you will get in the way of your own progress.
Refine the argument and polish the prose when you have something to work with first.
• Write the central argument of your section, chapter, thesis, or whatever unit you are working on
at the top of your computer screen (or on paper above it) so that it confronts you as you begin each
writing session.
Do the three thesis tricks
Although you (think you) know what your thesis is about, you might nd it dicult to
explain to someone who is not surrounded by it. You should be able to do this whenever
someone asks you what it is about. Your answers to these questions have likely changed quite
a bit over the course of the thesis, but make sure that this reects an increasing knowledge
about the thesis rather than jumping from subject to subject. Talking to faculty, graduate
students, and peers is important, but you will also nd it helpful to explain your project to a
friend or family member who knows little about it. Continually repeating the central goal
of your investigation and analysis in clear, understandable language will focus your writing.
Start fresh
If you get a bit overwhelmed by your analysis, start anew or from where you previously
left o. Save or le your document, and begin a blank computer le or with a new piece of
paper. Sometimes a fresh piece of paper gives you that little bit of freedom you need to clear
matters up. When you begin again at the beginning, you do not have to worry whether you
are o track or not. You can cut and paste the various documents together later.
Remember it’s “just a draft”
Any writer, especially a senior thesis writer, can be overwhelmed if he or she stops to
think, “This is supposed to be the masterpiece of my career.” You should more appropriately
think of the senior thesis as the capstone of your education and training. All of your skills
will make the experience a worthwhile one, and like any paper, the senior thesis comes out
in rough drafts that you will gradually improve by editing, more research, and the helpful
comments of others.
Ask for help
Balancing the various commitments in your life often requires some degree of
outside help, so that you can gure out the order of your priorities. This is precisely why
Harvard has the Bureau of Study Counsel (bsc.harvard.edu). Asking for help does not
imply inadequacy, weakness, or an inability to cope; it reects a degree of self-awareness
and knowledge that plenty of people have not yet attained. BSC workshops of particular
interest to thesis writers include: “Insanely Busy: What Would Happen If I Slowed Down?”,
“Perfectionism,” “Procrastination Group,” and ‘Senior Thesis Workshops.” Do yourself a
favor and check them out.
page 26 | Writing the Thesis
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 27
8
You may also want to go a stationery or oce supplies store and get boxes or crates to place all those
folders in. This way, you can keep track of your materials and move them about easily.
When you’re stuck, remember tortoises and hares
There are going to be times when you just can’t sustain the writing very well. You will
grind to a halt, and writing progress will be stuck. This may seem especially frustrating if
your peers appear to be cruising along while you are by the side of the road. This should not
surprise you too much: each thesis writer balances an individual project and its challenges
with curricular and extracurricular commitments. You will have to determine which factors
outside of the thesis are holding you back from progress on your thesis and make adjustments
so that you can better direct your eorts. Here are a few suggestions.
• Prioritize your readings
There are mountains of books and articles in your room. They overwhelm you. You wonder how quickly
you might die if they were to all fall over and crush you in your bed or at your desk. Were your room to
catch on fire, the blaze would be hot and fast, because of the sheer amount of paper. You need to do
something—you need to sort and organize.
Set aside two hours (write it in your calendar book or software). Create two piles: “To Read” and “To
Return.” Build the return pile with books that looked interesting down on Pusey 3 but which have
proven irrelevant in the bright light of the world above the ground. Having many, many, many books in
this category should not disconcert you. Rather, it is a good indication that you have a greater aware-
ness of the true focus of your topic. Next, flip through books you have not skimmed or read, but only
for 5–7 minutes (since you only have two hours allotted for this). From this scan, you should be able to
figure out if this book or article is worth any more of your time. If any portion looks useful, mark that
portion for reading (which gives you permission to ignore the rest of the book).
You may feel guilty about all of this, because it is “not really work.” You are just making new piles from
old piles. Not quite true. You are focusing your resources and assessing the state of your thesis even as
you make new piles. And it is only two hours of time.
• File, file, file
You are also likely to have a large quantity of photocopies and printouts. These also need a good sort.
Group them by topic, and put them in file folders that you have labeled for the purpose.
8
Do the same with your computer files. Categorize notes by subject, source, or thesis chapter. Also, as
regards your computer, make good use of meta-data. Whether you work on Mac OS X, some flavor of
Windows, or Linux, there are programs that keep track of all the data about your data. OS X uses a
native program called Spotlight to do this, and Mac and Windows users can both use Google Desktop.
Each of these programs catalogs the date(s), contents, keywords, and all sorts of other information
about each file you have on the hard drive. You can then type in a few words, and the program will pull
up all the files that match those words in some fashion. If you really want to be on top of things, most
operating systems allow you to also assign “keywords” to files. Keywords are essentially your own data
about your data.
You can do the same thing for any electronic sources you might find on the Internet. Check out a
bookmarking service like http://del.icio.us, which allows you to assign keywords to your bookmarked
pages (along with allowing access to all the other keywords other users have assigned to that resource).
Not only will this make everything neater, but the reorganization may spark you to find new
connections and gain insights into your material.
page 28 | Writing the Thesis
• Write up notes
If you like the facility that these meta-data programs offer, you may wish to enter all of your data, notes,
and other material into your computer, as the programs will give you access to all the information about
some set of words that you have come up with. Pen and paper notes also have their advantages, the
chief two being that they do not become randomly corrupted and that they can last for nearly infinite
amounts of time, given the right conditions. Whatever you do, make sure you have a working and
regular backup solution.
Similarly, you will want to keep a running commentary of your own thoughts about the notes that you
take. Even as you write down what a source says, write down your reactions to that information. Mark
these clearly in some fashion—bracket them, put an asterisk next to them, highlight them, whatever
works best for you—so you can distinguish them later from your informational notes. This will focus you
on the main task of collecting all this information: How useful is it? How does it connect to your theory
and to the other information you have gathered?
In addition, here are some “obvious” but still important bits of advice for your note-taking that even the
smartest of us sometimes forget (as recent high-profile cases where famous professors have committed
unintentional plagiarism demonstrate):
§ Always include the source and page number.
§ Indicate whether the notes are a direct quote or summary.
§ If you take notes via computer, print them out so that you have a hard copy backup. If you take
them on pen and paper, make photocopies regularly and store them in a separate, safe location.
§ As you write, no matter whether the words are flowing or not, do not fail to put in at least a
notation of any source you use and its page number. “Going back” to fill in references, even
if you are completely confident of your memory, makes you much more likely to commit
unintentional plagiarism.
• Work on your bibliography
In days of yore, we would have said something here about keeping track of your bibliographic
information, telling you to use downtime to update your bibliography and make sure it is current with
the sources you have used thus far in the thesis. A more useful approach now is to acquaint yourself
with computer resources that will do this work for you. We will take up some of these tools in Gov 99
and you can decide whether they work for you.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 29
chapter three
Gov 99 Matters
To help you navigate the thesis process described in the first two chapters,
the Government Department has developed the year-long Senior Thesis Writers’ Seminar
(Gov 99) course. This seminar has two goals. First, we will provide you with practical
guidance and writing advice as you complete your senior thesis in Government. We will
discuss many of the common hurdles and pitfalls that students often encounter. Since
critical thinking and careful writing are two sides of the same coin, we will focus on matters
related to assessing and improving your writing skills throughout the year. Second, the
seminar will bring you together with other government thesis writers, to share your
experiences, techniques, lessons learned, successes, failures, and progress on your theses.
This chapter describes what you can generally expect from the Gov 99 seminar. The
course syllabus and web page will provide you with this year’s details, e.g., dates, deadlines,
and specific assignments. Gov 99 is graded Sat/Unsat, but this does not mean that you should
consider it an “easy” class. You must fulfill a ll o f t he G ov 99 attendance, writing, and peer
review requirements in order to receive a grade of Satisfactory.
FAILURE TO COMPLETE ALL ASSIGNMENTS WILL RESULT IN A GRADE OF
UNSATISFACTORY. YOU CANNOT RECEIVE A PASSING GRADE ON YOUR THESIS
IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE A SATISFACTORY GRADE IN GOVERNMENT 99.
3.1 Seminar Logistics
In the Fall shopping period, all seniors who are planning to write a thesis in the upcom-
ing academic year must section for Gov 99. Part of the sectioning process involves organizing
sections by sub-field (Theory, International Relations, Comparative, and American Politics) or
thematic area (e.g., party politics, war/security, education policy).You can expect to be placed in
a section with 4-8 other thesis writers who are also writing in your general area of interest. You
will begin to receive notices about Gov 99 meeting times as the Fall semester nears.
Once you are assigned a Gov 99 section, you will meet regularly (but not every week)
throughout the Fall and Spring semesters until the thesis is due. Each meeting will last one
hour. Gov 99 seminar attendance is MANDATORY. Unexcused absences from Gov 99
will aect your grade and your ability to continue writing the thesis.
All Gov 99 readings will be provided either in class or through online distribution on the
course website. The course web page is available via my.harvard.edu, and will be updated
regularly during the academic year.
3.2 What Do You Do in Gov 99?
Gov 99 will be an academic experience unlike most of your previous courses at Harvard.
Instead of discussing someone else’s book or study, each week of Gov 99 will be about you
and your peers’ research and writing. Later in this chapter we discuss at length what it means
to do “peer review,” and why the review process is so useful to your development as a writer.
As you will see on the syllabus, each week of Gov 99 concerns an important step in the thesis
writing process. We will spend time on the topics that have been presented in this guide, including:
• How do I budget my time? What if I seem to be falling further behind?
• How do I establish an effective working relationship with my adviser? What if my advising relationship
isn’t working?
• How do I write a literature review? How do I know what’s most important to read/write about?
• How do I set up my research design? What, exactly, is a “research design” again?
• How am I going to find evidence? Where should I look? What if I can’t find anything?
• How can I measure or observe the phenomena I want to study?
• What do I do about statistics if I’ve never taken a statistics course?
• How do I frame my argument?
• How do I present all this evidence?
• What are all the formatting requirements?
We will answer these questions and many more in Gov 99. This workshop is meant to
complement your relationship with your adviser and to provide guidance throughout the
thesis process. We will do this via group discussions about issues and problems in political
research. Beyond the nuts and bolts of writing and research, Gov 99 will also serve as the
time each week when you can gain support from fellow thesis writers.
3.3 Specific Gov 99 Writing Requirements
Gov 99 involves seven writing assignments, with the seventh being the nal submission
of your thesis. Your 99 section leader will inform you of the deadlines for each of the rst
six assignments. For each of these six, please consult with your thesis adviser regarding the appropriate
content for inclusion. Each submission should reect thesis work you are already doing. In other words,
the assignments are not designed to impose additional burdens.
1. Preliminary statement of thesis question and research methods (1–2 paragraphs circulated
to your 99 section leader and section members). By the second meeting of Gov 99, you will
prepare a preliminary version of your question. As you complete this assignment, recall that
your question should speak to the existing scholarship in political science.
2. Thesis Proposal (approx. 1,500 words, submitted, along with the requisite signed cover sheet, to
the Undergraduate Program Office, your adviser, and Gov 99 section members ). This document
should detail your thesis project and its methodology, as well as what you’ve accomplished so far
and what still remains to be done. (Specific questions to be answered are indicated on the cover
sheet for this exercise, which is available from the Undergraduate Program Office or through the
Government Department's website.)
3. First draft of an "academic engagement" chapter (10-15 pages circulated to your Gov 99
section leader and assigned peer-review partner). What have other political scientists said with
respect to your question, and how does your study add to this discussion?
4. Draft of a substantive empirical or analytical chapter (15-20 pages circulated to your Gov
99 section leader and assigned peer-review partner). In this draft you are no longer telling others
what you will do, but actually demonstrating how you are going about generating results.
5. At least 7,500 words (about 30 pages) sent to your formal thesis adviser (not your Gov 99
TF!) on the last day of classes in the Fall semester. Normally this takes the form of a revised and
expanded empirical or analytical chapter, but you should negotiate the exact content with your
adviser beforehand. (Note: The thesis adviser assigns your Fall grade on this basis, provided you
actively participated in Gov 99; he or she will be notified of any attendance problems by the
Undergraduate Program Office.) The more developed this material is, the more productive your
adviser can be in offering constructive feedback.
page 30 | Gov 99 Matters
6. Draft of a second substantive empirical or analytical chapter (15-20 pages [not a rewrite of
what you handed in back in November!] circulated to your Gov 99 section leader and assigned
peer-review partner). To be completed in the beginning of the Spring term, by the date indicated
in the Gov 99 syllabus. This assignment will enable you to present a draft chapter to the class
and receive substantive feedback regarding your argument and its execution. No one—not even
tenured faculty—writes their finished product at the first go.
7. Final thesis (submitted to the Undergraduate Program Office by the deadline specified on the
syllabus). The guidelines for formatting and submission are discussed in Ch. 4, and will be
discussed in class. Note: Submitting a thesis to the Undergraduate Program Office by the dead-
line will result in an automatic SAT grade for the Spring term of Gov 99 provided all other
course requirements have been met. This grade is separate from the actual grading of the thesis.
3.4 Learning from Previous Theses
One of the best ways to learn how to write a thesis is by examining theses written by
Government Department seniors in the past. There are several ways to do this, and you
don’t need to wait for Gov 99 to get started. First, you can visit the Harvard library
system, and look at the Hoopes Prize theses, and theses graded Magna and above. These
represent some of the best theses in our department and beyond. Second, you can check
out the Government Undergraduate Program Online Thesis Repository (bit.ly/2wJJgTt)
which includes a growing number of recent theses.
Finally, we will spend time in Gov 99 reading and analyzing a sample thesis appropriate
to your subfield. Reading and critiquing a completed senior thesis is useful for several
reasons. First, it provides real evidence that the task can actually be completed. Your pages
of notes, journal entries, document chunks, photocopies, primary sources, and datasets can
become an actual thesis. Second, the sample gives a feel for the distinct flow of a thesis.
The sample thesis you receive will by no means be perfect; it will be indicative of
solid, meritorious performance. It can serve as a model for your own research and writing,
giving you an idea of something to aspire toward. The sample thesis that you read,
however, is not an ideal to be copied—the style, organization, approach, and tone may
not be appropriate for your own work, and you should make decisions about these matters
in consultation with your thesis adviser.
When you read a thesis, whether it’s the sample thesis or one of the others that
you’ve located, consider the following questions:
• What assumptions does the writer make about the project?
• What choices does the writer make in presenting the research?
• How does the writer use the evidence?
• How does the writer situate the evidence in a larger body of theory?
• What is the central argument? What are the sub-arguments? How are they interrelated?
• What is the thesis really about?
Take notes as you read and analyze the theses. As your own thesis nears completion, you
will nd it helpful to look back on these notes with the following questions in mind:
1. Did you emulate the strengths you appreciated?
2. Did you avoid the pitfalls you identified?
3. How did you situate your thesis (in the context of a larger set of puzzles and questions)?
Reminding yourself how you responded to a completed thesis will heighten your
awareness of how readers will respond to your own thesis.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 31
page 32 | Gov 99 Matters
3.5 Framing the Question: Writing the Thesis Proposal
The thesis proposal marks the culmination of your question refinement phase. It
outlines what you plan to accomplish through further research, and summarizes what
you have achieved so far. As such, it should restate your puzzle, elaborate the theoretical
explanation you offer, note hypotheses or suppositions that you have tested or will test,
and address your methodology and any preliminary (or expected) conclusions. The point
of the thesis proposal is to ensure that you have a carefully and appropriately designed
project, and that you are implementing data collection protocols properly. Insofar as you are
able, get your ideas down on paper well before the proposal is due and ask for feedback
from your adviser. This will force you to be more precise and put you in a better position
to take advantage of any comments your adviser may offer. (Please note: your thesis
proposal should address the specific questions outlined on the Thesis Proposal Cover
Sheet, a signed copy of which must be submitted, along with your answers, to the
Undergraduate Program Office by the date specified in the Gov 99 syllabus.)
The thesis proposal you submit to the Government Department in the Fall term will
probably look very different than what you thought you would be doing when you
handed in your advising contract in May. And that is not only okay, but actually a good
sign. Ideas evolve over the summer months, and you will have a better sense of how
feasible your initial course of research is after thinking about, and working on, the topic for
several months.
In writing the thesis proposal, it may be helpful to think in terms of another
forward-looking document—the business plan. When companies are looking to attract
new investors, they will often send around a document that outlines a plan for what they
want to achieve and how they will go about attaining their goal. This business plan allows
investors to decide whether the business is likely to be profitable and whether the
potential profits are worth the risks; it also allows investors to ask questions (and even
make suggestions for revision) of the proposed strategy.
Of course, since academic research and funding a business are not the same, there are
also important differences between a business plan and a thesis proposal. You need not
sell your project (except in the persuasive sense). But the similarities are more than skin
deep, primarily because both documents seek to do the same thing: convince an
audience that you have done your initial due diligence and have formulated a plan to
conduct a long-term project and complete it successfully.
More specifically, in the same fashion as a company would present a plan for setting up
and growing a business, your research statement must present a “research design”—a run-
down of the particular tools that you will use to obtain evidence and test it against your
theory and derived hypotheses, along with a summary of what you have already
accomplished and concluded. In addition, just as a business plan provides a basis for
investors to ask questions about the enterprise, your research statement will provide your
adviser the opportunity to see where you are in the data-gathering process and to raise
questions about the project. Finally, just as business plans are succinct, your research
statement should be as well: 1,500 words more or less (about 6 pages, in 11- or 12-
point font, with one-inch margins and double spacing).
Take the thesis proposal seriously! This is not a task to be gotten out of the way so that
you can get on with the “real work” of your thesis. This is real work. The proposal is a
diagnostic, chronicling what you’ve achieved so far and how successful your initial ideas
have proven, and also a forward-looking document setting out what you will do—and
how you will do it—over the course of the next six months. It should not surprise you
that writing the proposal often proves conceptually harder than many other phases of
research.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 33
What should you include in the thesis proposal? The Thesis Proposal Cover Sheet lists
five questions you are expected to answer, and your adviser may suggest some additional
points to address. Below are some basic guidelines and suggestions:
• Begin with a precise and concise presentation of your question and its relevance to the study of
politics. This will not be a comprehensive literature review, but should allow your adviser to see
at least an approximation of how your thesis will connect to previous disciplinary scholarship. You
will also want to note how your thinking on the matter has evolved over time. It’s okay if at this
stage you are still struggling with how to best frame the research question—doing so is an
iterative process for most people. However, letting your adviser know where you stand with
respect to the project and starting to get feedback will be very useful to you. An adviser is likely
to read your research statement and reply with comments such as “I think you should read…” or
“scholars X and Y would be very interested in your question, why don’t you look at their work.”
• Once the question animating your thesis is presented, the bulk of the research statement should be
de-voted to explaining your research design and its evolution. The “research design” is the
combination of specific methods that you will use (or have already used) to collect and analyze
evidence. In Gov 99, you will discuss basic social science terminology that can be helpful to
specifying your research design (e.g., independent and dependent variables, normative and positive
arguments, causal inference, and counter-factual reasoning). Be specific! Do not simply state you
are doing “case studies” or “statistical analysis”: how and from where are you gathering the
information for your case study, or what particular data are you using?
• The importance of thinking ahead about your research design cannot be overstated. If your
research design cannot provide sufficient evidence to answer your question, then you need to
either change it or pose a new question. The thesis proposal, by allowing your adviser to
examine your research design and the progress you have already made, serves as an early
warning system for poorly matched questions and methods.
• A rule to follow as you write the thesis proposal is to
be as detailed and specific as possible.
The more detailed your statement, the more detailed the feedback you will receive on it, both
from your adviser and your peers in Gov 99. For instance, if you state simply that “I am
collecting information about both these arguments,” you won’t get much back in the way of
constructive criticism. However, suppose you write “I am in the process of gathering data from
eight different countries.” Seeing this, your adviser might recognize that eight countries are too
many (e.g., you won’t have enough time, so let’s figure out how to focus on four), or too few
(e.g., there’s actually a dataset you can use that will allow you to compare 80 countries).
• Here are some suggestions to make your proposal as specific as possible:
§ Are you conducting case studies? If so, how many? By what criteria are you choosing
your cases? Does your case selection facilitate answering the research question as you’ve
posed it? (Also, please note: a “case study” is a specific technique of qualitative
methodology and not a generic term for any narrative).
§ Are you conducting interviews, and, if so, whom are you interviewing? Are you
examining or planning to examine primary documents, and, if so, which ones? How
difficult is it to gain access to the people, places, or things you want to examine? Have you
done fieldwork already, or are you planning to do so?
§ Are you conducting statistical analysis? If so, what level of statistical knowledge do you
have? What type of data are you using, and how did you obtain it (or how are you
going about obtaining it)? How will the data and analysis help you answer your question as
you’ve stated it?
§ Are you making normative claims about how the world “should” work? If so, whose
theories are you building your arguments? What counter-arguments are you considering?
§ Is what you’re proposing feasible? How has the project progressed so far? Can you finish
collect-ing the evidence you need, analyze it, and write it up in the next six months?
Granted, you have only 1,500 or so words in which to do all this, so you may not
describe each of the above points in as much detail as you might like. In reality, that’s a
good state to be in—it will force you to write sparingly and concentrate on what is most
important to your project.
3.6 Peer Review
In the course of the Senior Thesis Writers’ Seminar, you will evaluate several of your peers’
draft chapters. The goal of this peer review is to expose you to collegial criticism of your work. This is
exactly the kind of feedback that your professors and teaching fellows solicit when they ask
colleagues to critique drafts of their work or send articles to peer-reviewed journals.
You are well qualied to undertake this sort of criticism because, as a writer of political
research and analysis, you are attuned to those factors that make for good research writing.
This process will hone your skills as your own editor; it will also assist your peers in honing
their skills. Remember, the key to this process lies in oering analytic criticism; you need to
be specic in identifying the nature of the problems you encounter, and your mindset should
be, “What would make this piece better?” Even if you cannot oer a solution to your peer’s
problems, you should seek to improve what you read.
Knowing something about the topic that you read about is not really necessary. It may, in
fact, be helpful that you do not know much about it—you will be able to give advice and
feedback that will make the work under consideration more accessible to a wider range of
political science readers. You are the expert on your own topic, and that can sometimes lead
to a myopia about the subject of your labors. Peer reviews are opportunities to assess whether
details, assumptions, and connections you take for granted need to be made clearer for the
sake of your readers.
Everyone shares responsibility for achieving the goals of peer reviews, so all participants
must adhere to the following guidelines and instructions.
When preparing feedback, do not be shy or embarrassed about asking for clarication,
elaboration, or further explanation. As a peer reviewer, it’s your responsibility to signal to
your partners that passages or points are potentially confusing. This is not done due to the
writer having chosen a bad topic or approach—you must oer advice on how a friendly but
skeptical reader may approach the piece. You are an ideal thesis reader because you are a thesis writer.
If you are still perplexed after reading a passage over and over, do not be afraid to ag that
for the writer. Assume the challenge of helping the writer convey the point to the reader.
Being a good reader requires a lot of eort, almost as much as writing the passage in the
rst place. You may have been frustrated in the past by the number or quality of the com-
ments you have received (or, more usually, did not) on class papers; now that you can see
how dicult that task is, make sure that your thesis writing peer gets comments at least as
good as those you hope to get yourself. Be specic in your comments. “This passage was
unclear—can you explain it to me?” would be much less helpful than:
• “I had to read this passage a few times, and I think you’re suggesting X. Is that the case? What did
I miss?”
• “On this page, you make points X, Y, and Z. I see how X and Z are related, but I can’t figure out how Y
relates to X and Z. What is their relationship?”
• “Your theory introduces term X, but I am unsure what X means in the context of your theory. Can you
make that relationship clearer?”
• “You said that you plan to assess concept A by measure X, but I don’t understand why they go together.
Can you be more specific about how X provides a good measure of A? How are they related?”
• “You state that method X provides the best way to assess your theory’s relevance, but you don’t
compare that method to any other. Can you discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of this
particular methodology? Why is it the ‘best’?”
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A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 35
As a peer reviewer, your job lies in motivating your thesis partners to improve the drafts
that have come out of the research they have done. By focusing on issues of clarity, ex-
planation, and presentation, you help them to present themselves as self-aware, condent
researchers. Do not, however,“line-edit.” Checking spelling, punctuation, and grammar are
less helpful at this stage than you might think. If your thesis partners take your suggestions
seriously, they will engage in some substantial revisions, and such suggestions will be largely
irrelevant. The focus of peer review is on fundamental elements of chapters: structure, analysis,
and presentation of evidence.
Remember the above when receiving comments from thesis writing partners. The
tone and content of feedback should be positive, even when critical. As you receive your
comments from your partners and seminar leaders, you will help yourself much more by
listening than arguing or defending your writing.
Tips for reading chapters
When you read a classmate’s chapter, you should follow the general approach outlined
below. Your Gov 99 workshop leader will provide specic instructions for the format of
comments for your classmates.
Locate the central argument
What is the central argument of the work in front of you? There should be some passage
that the author uses to indicate the main idea the author wants to convey over the next 25
pages or so. Double underline that passage.
Identifying tasks
In carrying out the central idea of the chapter, the author should indicate a series of tasks or
steps that she or he will fulll to sustain that argument. These tasks can include: oering back-
ground information, expounding on the theory, developing hypotheses, presenting evidence,
drawing connections between pieces of evidence presented, arguing for the causal connection
of evidence to theory, describing a methodology, and so forth. For this exercise, nd (up to) the
four most important tasks the author sets out; underline and number those tasks. Assess wheth-
er the author accomplishes those tasks (or whether there are tasks that the author should have
undertaken but did not), and label each passage with the number of the task it helps to fulll.
Paragraph assessment
Every paragraph in the draft chapter should accomplish some piece of the tasks that the
chapter seeks to fulll. Most will do this in a fairly adequate fashion, and so they will not
need special attention from you. Others, however, will strike you in some way, and you
need to mark them so the author knows that he or she should pay special attention to those
paragraphs in the process of revision. Mark paragraphs like these with a + or - and elaborate
upon the reasons for doing so in a marginal note.
• What does a - mean (for example)?
§ Paragraphs that do not help to accomplish the stated goals of the chapter are likely to be
superfluous, and they might need to be removed. BUT they might simply be misplaced. Consider,
for example, an interesting point or piece of evidence that does not seem to be related to the
stated tasks of the chapter. It may simply be that the author has left out material that would
connect this material to the main ideas and tasks of the chapter. Help the author to think about
how to connect this lonesome bit of prose to the larger chapter.
§ Perhaps it really is filler material. Explain why you think this to be the case.
§ It may be repetitious or wordy. Help the author to make efficient use of his or her prose.
§ It might be an interesting point, but perhaps it detracts from the main flow of the text and
argument. You could suggest that the author consider moving it to a footnote or another
location where it will prove less of an impediment to the larger goals of the chapter.
• What might need a +?
§ The paragraph presents material vital to the central argument of the chapter.
§ The paragraph links together tasks or crucial ideas.
§ The paragraph fulfills one of the tasks you identified above.
Topics to consider
In all cases, there are some “objective” criteria that all draft pieces of writing must fulll if
they are to be truly eective. No matter how polished the prose, sophisticated the methods,
or brilliant the theory, the chapter can still fail if the author does not do the following.
• Evidence There are several tasks regarding evidence that an author must fulfill. First, is there enough
convincing evidence or evidentiary logic to sustain the central argument? If the author does not provide
a representative sample or does not show how the philosophical principle under discussion matters
in the “real world,” then there may be sufficient reason to doubt the conclusions. Second, does the
evidence have sufficient explanation or analysis? In this case, if the author does not provide a full
discussion of what the evidence can indicate, the chapter may again fail to fulfill its purpose or tasks.
Third, not all components of the chapter or tasks are equal in importance. The space an author dedicates
to a task should be proportionate to that component’s importance in advancing the central argument.
• Accessibility and transparency This topic covers several matters. First, the material must be
accessible to the reader. As thesis writers, you may often get so involved in the subject that you forget
what “basic” knowledge you need to provide for your reader. All key terms, especially ones that are
specialized or used in very particular ways, should be defined. The narrative should move smoothly from
one point to the next; transitions and the pattern of logic should be clear. Is there enough background
material to make the context of the central point and the tasks clear? Second, the material should be
transparent. Do you detect any subtle or explicit biases? Does the author consider all the evidence, or
just that which upholds one side of the story?
Final thoughts on peer review
When you nish reading a peer’s chapter, consider the following questions:
• What did you take away from the chapter?
• What else do you want to know about the subject of the chapter?
• Where is the author most hesitant? Most confident?
Finally, write down three reections about the chapter, perhaps highlighting elements you
found intriguing or suggestions for general improvement.
3.7 Reviewing Your Own Chapter
In large part, the way you review another’s chapter is how you should review your own.
This is certainly not easy, but you must critique your writing if you wish to improve it.
Follow the instructions for locating the central argument, identifying your tasks, assessing
paragraphs, and the nal instructions in the previous section.
3.8 Dropping the Thesis and Gov 99
Unfortunately, sometimes a project doesn’t work out in the end. Either you nd you don’t
have the time to devote to it that it deserves, or the data you gather don’t answer the question
you initially posed. It is often a dicult decision to make, but sometimes it is the right one.
If you are thinking seriously (as opposed to deliriously, say at 3:00 a.m. after a particularly
grueling writing session) about dropping the thesis, you should talk to either the Director of
Undergraduate Studie s ( Dr. Nara Dillon ) or the Assistant Director (Dr. George Soroka) as
soon as possible. You should not register for the second half of Gov 99 if you are not going to
complete the thesis; Gov 99 is divisible for this very reason. A SAT grade for 99 in the Spring
term depends on turning in a completed thesis by the specified due date. If a student does register
for a second semester of Gov 99 but realizes later on that she or he will not be able to
submit a finished thesis to the Department, she or he must withdraw from the course by
the FAS deadline for doing so. It is the student’s responsibility to be aware of the relevant
deadlines and to act upon them accordingly.
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A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 37
chapter four
Formatting, Submitting,
and Grading
4.1 Formatting
Length
The length of a thesis must conform to these standards:
1. Maximum: 35,000 words of text.
2. Minimum: 15,000 words of text.
3. Recommended: 20,000 to 30,000 words (80–120 pages). Theory or highly quantitative theses are usu-
ally shorter than other theses. As a general rule, shorter is better: long theses are usually poorly edited.
4. Appendices (including discussions of data sources and methodology) count toward the word limit.
Tables, charts, and graphs do not count toward the limit. Where possible, though, they should be
integrated into the flow of the text rather than placed at the end of the thesis.
5. Bibliographies do not count toward the limit.
6. Footnotes do not count toward the word limit if they are merely citations. Footnotes do count toward
the word limit if they are long and substantive.
Style and Format
Style and formatting rules are as follows:
1. Style will conform to an accepted style manual, such as Turabian or the Chicago Manual of Style
(latest editions). We recommend you purchase one of these works. However, whichever style
guide you ultimately decide to follow, remember that “consistency of usage” is key.
2. Dedications and acknowledgments (including acknowledgments of funding) are prohibited before the
thesis is graded, although they may be added (after grading) to theses going to the Archives. Any men-
tion of the adviser is especially prohibited, in order to ensure impartiality in grading.
3. Page format must be as follows:
a. Spacing: the thesis should be double-spaced.
b. Margins: left, two inches; right, top, and bottom, one inch.
c. Page numbers are required: centered or right corner, top or bottom of page.
d. Citations: if placed at the bottom of the page, should be separated from the text by a 1.5 inch
line drawn starting at the left margin. Citations may also be collected as endnotes at the back
of the text or through an author-date reference system. Citations may NOT be placed after
individual chapters. A bibliography should always be provided even if the writer provides full
citations in endnotes or footnotes.
e. Text: printed in black ink on only one face of each sheet of paper (no double-sided printing or copying).
f. Figures, charts, graphs, photos: these may be reproduced in color.
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4. The thesis will begin with a title page following the format in Figure 4.1.
5. Typeface: any easily readable font, no smaller than 11-point nor larger than 12-point type, is acceptable.
Laser printers are required.
6. Quotations: In quoting phrases or short passages, quotation marks must be used. Quotations of fifty
words or more should be set apart from the body of the text as a block quote (no quotation marks are
used in this case). Omissions within a quotation are permissible provided the sense is not distorted, and
must be indicated by an ellipsis (…). For further details, please consult the aforementioned style guides.
7. When the final words of a sentence are omitted, one ellipsis and one period are used. Editorial com-
ments within a quotation must be enclosed in brackets. Example: “If it realizes its promoters’ hopes,
the [European Coal and Steel] Community may be called upon to play a unifying role in the economic
order….” Passages in foreign languages should be quoted in English translation (either in a published
translation or in your own). You may reproduce the original wording in a footnote if you think that it is
important or desirable.
8. A footnote, endnote, or author-date citation must be used to state precisely the source or authority
for every important statement of fact, for every quotation, and for every idea or inference derived
from another source. The key is to be consistent and not mix and match forms (e.g., in-text author
quotes, citations and endnotes). The Government Department does not require any particular style
be followed, but does expect that the respective conventions of whatever usage you choose will be
consistently utilized.
When the matter in any paragraph comes from several sources you may include all references in one
note. For footnote style, consult the Chicago Manual of Style or Turabian’s Manual for Writers.
Refer to the Harvard publication Writing with Sources (
bit.ly/1sUXo3v) to ensure that quotations
are used appropriately. The American Political Science Association (APSA) also provides an online style
guide available at bit.ly/1J6qOrD that you may also find useful.
9. Appendices should be seen essentially as expanded footnotes. Avoid them unless you think that you
must add important and unfamiliar ideas to your text. An appendix consists of additional but incidental
support for an argument already developed in the body of your thesis, or of in-depth discussion of
research and analytic methodology that is inappropriate to the main body of text.
10.A bibliography must be placed at the end of your thesis. It should inform your reader of the actual
extent of your research. Include only the books, articles, and primary sources that you have cited in
your thesis.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 39
A Brilliant Thesis
A thesis presented
by
First M. Last
Presented to the
Department of Government
in partial fulllment of the requirements
for the degree with honors
of Bachelor of Arts
Harvard College
Month 20XX
If the thesis is by a joint concentrator, the line
reading “The Department of Government” should be
re-placed by lines listing the primary and allied
concentrations (in that order), e.g.:
The Department of Government
and
The Department of Classics
Figure 4.1: Thesis Title Page
4.2 Submitting the Thesis
The Department’s Rules and Requirements
All theses submitted to the Department of Government must comply with the following
rules and requirements. Violations may be penalized or may result in the rejection of the
thesis.
Theses must be submitted in the following manner:
1. The deadline for submitting theses to the Undergraduate Program Office is 5:00 p.m. on the
Wednesday three days before Spring Break. Late theses must be submitted in accordance with the
procedures described in the section below on “Penalties and rules for accepting a late thesis.”
2. Two copies of every thesis must be submitted. A single copy is not acceptable.
3. Thesis paper must be “acid free.” Ask for acid free, thesis grade, or archival quality paper when you
have your thesis copied (you may also print out two copies, provided they are identical in every respect).
These terms mean high quality paper which will not smear, fade, or otherwise deteriorate. You do not
need to buy the most expensive paper in order to meet these standards; you should be able to buy
enough paper for both copies of your thesis for around $10.
4. Theses must be submitted in black, hardcover, spring binders. These are referred to as “springback”
binders and are available from many good stationary stores and numerous online sources. The
Undergraduate Program Office has a small supply of used binders available free to you as well, on a
first-come, first-served basis.
5. An electronic, PDF version of the thesis
must also be submitted
to the Gov 99 Canvas dropbox no later
than 11:59 p.m. on the Wednesday three days before Spring Break
Computers and printers:
To get the most from your computer, heed the following advice:
1. Make sure your computer has enough memory.
2. Save revisions every few minutes and keep backup copies in different locations. You can never be too careful.
3. Back up your hard drive and thesis directories often, especially as you are actively working. Have more
than one backup copy in more than one location.
4. Divide the thesis and keep each chapter in a separate file.
5. Correct your text on hard-copy and then type it into the computer. Keep hard-copy files of each chapter.
6. Use a spell-checker early and often.
The problem with printing is that no one ever worries about it until it is too late, and then
it is literally too late. How do you keep your printer from walking all over you?
Follow these simple rules:
1. Print out at least two days before the thesis is due, and make arrangements for a backup printer in case
yours breaks down. Have extra paper and toner cartridges on hand. Moreover, even with a laser printer,
a printout of an entire thesis can take quite some time, even without major problems.
2. Know your print requirements, and know your equipment. You should be familiar with the printer you
use for the final draft; do not print your final draft on a machine you have never used before. Do not wait
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A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 41
until the last minute to learn that the printer cannot do everything the word processing program asks
of it. If you have special graphs, tables, or charts, be sure that the printer will reproduce them properly.
3. Plan ahead. If you do not own a printer, make definite arrangements well in advance for the printer you
intend to use. If the printer in your house computer room is being used by someone else, or your friend
whose printer you are borrowing forgets, you can be in hot water.
4. Know how fast your printer prints.
5. Carefully label your backup files lest you print out an old copy accidentally.
6. Print the final draft in stages, as you finish each chapter. Even the most dependable printer can find
something to object to when asked to print 120 pages all at once.
7. Adhere to the printer regulations below. Not all printers produce acceptable output. The output from your
printer must be of “archival quality.” (Use of a laser printer is required. You may not use an inkjet printer.)
A FINAL REMINDER: No extensions, under any circumstances, are given for computer problems.
Photocopying:
Once the thesis is all printed out, it still has to be photocopied (unless you are feeling
lucky, and decide to print out the two copies). This will take more time than you think;
remember, half of Harvard will be in line in front of you. Arriving at the copy store at 3:00
p.m. on Wednesday will earn you at least an ulcer, if not a lateness penalty. The Depart-
ment requires two copies (remember, on acid-free high quality paper, bound in black spring
binders), and you will probably want a copy or two of your own.
When you get your thesis back from the copy center, check it carefully for copying errors.
Copy centers have been known to miscopy, lose, or change the order of pages.
Deadline reminder:
At 5:00 p.m. on the Wednesday three days before Spring Break, two copies of all theses
must have been turned in at the Undergraduate Program Oce, CGIS Knafel, 1737 Cam-
bridge Street, K151. This is an inflexible deadline. Please do not forget that you also need to submit
an electronic PDF copy to the Gov 99 Canvas dropbox no later than 11:59 p.m. on the Wednesday
three days before Spring Break.
Penalties and rules for accepting late theses:
Penalties are allotted to late theses. For each day that the thesis is late, the grade will
be reduced by .12 point (based on the 4-point Harvard grading scale).There will be no
exceptions to this rule without the prior written permission of the Director of Undergradu-
ate Studies. Therefore, plan for emergencies and leave plenty of time to produce your two
copies. The following departmental guidelines govern the acceptance of late theses:
1. A student may submit a late thesis to the Undergraduate Program Office — without prior approval
from the DUS — if the thesis is submitted to the Undergraduate Program Office by 5:00 p.m. the Friday
immediately following the Wednesday due date. Penalties noted above will apply.
a. The time and day of submission will be recorded.
b. A thesis submitted by 5:00 p.m. on the Thursday following the Wednesday due date will be
considered one day late.
c. A thesis submitted by 5:00 p.m. on the Friday following the Wednesday due date will be
considered two days late.
page 42 | Formatting, Submitting, and Grading
2. Any thesis that is not turned in by 5:00 p.m. on the Friday following the Wednesday due date will be
accepted only if prior permission has been granted by the DUS. This permission will only be granted
under exceptional, documented extenuating circumstances.
If you are late…
Inevitably, a few seniors are unable to meet the 5:00 p.m. deadline. If you are one, don’t
panic. However, note that the Department will issue penalties for a late thesis, and that
an incomplete thesis will not be accepted at all. If you are late, follow these guidelines and
procedures:
1. Call the Undergraduate Program Office the minute you think you will be late. Do not bring a partially
completed thesis to the Undergraduate Program Office —– it will not be accepted. Bring only two
copies of a completed thesis.
2. Finish both copies as quickly as possible. Hours count. Theses that are days late will be penalized and
risk disqualification.
3. If you are only an hour or so late, call the Undergraduate Program Office again. The staff is usually on
duty that evening to take slightly late theses, although these will be penalized.
4. WARNING! Theses must be submitted to the Undergraduate Program Office (1737 Cambridge St.)
ONLY! NO ONE ELSE can accept theses or bear responsibility for the time of their submission.
Extensions:
Extensions can only be granted by formal application to the Government Department’s
Director of Undergraduate Studies. In the past, extensions have been granted only for deaths
in the family, severe illness requiring hospitalization, and similar extreme cases. If you nd
yourself in such a situation, contact the Undergraduate Program Oce immediately.
4.3 The Thesis Grading Process
A quick overview
You turned your thesis in, and you shared a toast with your fellow thesis writers at the
reception. Now what? You have questions in your mind like: Who will read and grade my
thesis? How will it be graded? How will it aect my overall honors determination? How
are my honors determined? This section presents a detailed overview of what happens after
you submit your thesis.
1. At the beginning of the Spring semester, you will receive an email about when and how to submit
a “Title and Description” form with some specific information about your thesis topic and research
methods. The staff in the Undergraduate Program Office takes that information, puts it all together, and
sends it out to the Government Department professors and graduate students who are potential thesis
readers. Readers send us back a list of their preferences, and we use a database to match your thesis
with readers.
2. Your thesis will be read by one faculty member and one graduate student. If the two readers are a full
grade or more apart in their assessment of the work, your thesis will go out to a third reader (this can
be either a faculty member or a graduate student). If your thesis had only two readers, you will receive
the average of the grades. If your thesis had three readers, the two outlying grades will count 25%
each, and the median grade will count 50%. Students will be notified when they can pick up their thesis
grades (generally in late April).
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 43
3. Your final Government Grade Point Average (GPA) is then determined by weighting your Government
concentration average to your thesis average 2:1.
4. A rank list (in order of highest overall GPA to lowest) of all honors students is then produced, and is
reviewed at the first meeting of the Board of Senior Examiners. The Board draws preliminary lines for
highest honors, high honors, honors, and no honors. Based on these lines, the board selects students for
oral exams.
5. The Faculty Concentration Committee (FCC) selects certain potential summa candidates for an oral exam.
If selected, you will be notified and given approximately a week to prepare for the 45 minute
examination.
6. After the oral exams are completed, a new rank list is produced with the oral exam grades averaged in.
Government concentration average, thesis average, and oral exam grade are weighted 6:3:1.
7. The FCC meets for a second time and draws lines again. These lines are presented to the entire
teaching staff of the Department (graduate students and faculty) at the Final Honors
Determination Meeting. The teaching members of the department vote on the placement of the lines,
which vary from year-to-year depending on the candidate pool and are confidential.
8. Finally, in mid-May, students are presented with a letter from the Government Department Chair
indicating their levels of honors.
Grading
All faculty and teaching fellows in the Department may serve as readers for senior theses.
The thesis is initially assigned to two readers (one faculty member and one graduate stu-
dent), but in some situations a thesis is assigned a third reader. The additional reader is not
informed of the earlier grades. Your thesis will be returned to you with a sheet indicating
the names of your readers, the grades they gave, the amount of any lateness penalty, and the
composite grade for the thesis. The following instructions about grading are given to all
readers of theses.
Grade levels
Summa cum laude. A summa thesis ought to be a distinct contribution to knowledge.
Whether it is successful research on a new or little-studied problem, or an original and
perceptive reassessment of a familiar question, it should manifest the consistency of high
achievement expected in professional work (though even a summa thesis is unlikely to
evidence the comprehensiveness and polish of a dissertation or published article). It should
represent a substantial amount of eort and show the student’s familiarity with the literature
on the subject. It should not rely on secondary sources where work with primary sources
is appropriate. It ought to be well written and proofread, free of errors in spelling, citation,
and general presentation. Its arguments ought to be concise and logically organized, and
the allocation of space judicious. A summa therefore is not equivalent to just any A, but the
sort given by teachers who almost never give them or reserve them for extraordinary merit.
Many experienced thesis readers have never read a summa thesis. A summa minus is equiva-
lent to a more usual A, but it is still a cut above A. Although it lacks the consistency of a
straight summa, it is still in almost all respects, substantive and stylistic, of professional quality.
Magna cum laude. A magna plus thesis should achieve a similar level of quality in
some respects though it falls short in others. A magna thesis need not be a contribution to
knowledge, but it should show real achievement, more than mere evidence of hard work
and unusual intelligence. A magna thesis is a work worthy of “great honor.” A magna minus
should also show hard work and unusual intelligence, though the results achieved may not
be as successful due to an unhappy choice of topic or approach, or to deciencies in the style
of presentation.
Cum laude. As is appropriate for a grade “with honors,” a cum thesis should show
serious thought and eort in its general approach if not in every detail. It should not repre-
sent merely the satisfactory completion of a task. A student should not automatically receive
a cum minus merely because he or she has written a thesis. Nevertheless, a grade of “not
of distinction” (C or D with + or -, or E) should be reserved only for those circumstances
when the thesis is hastily and carelessly constructed, a mere summary of existing material,
or otherwise poorly conceived and executed. The high standards that the Department ap-
plies to theses must clearly be violated for a thesis to merit a grade of “not of distinction.”
Within the “not of distinction” category, a C represents satisfactory work, whereas D and E
are unsatisfactory. The Department has sometimes held that a composite thesis grade of “no
distinction” should be a bar to honors regardless of the student’s performance in courses.
Ranking
Senior honors candidates are ranked on the basis of a numerical score made up of grades
in courses and the thesis.
Courses: All Government courses (and course-equivalents) and all General Education
courses taught by Government faculty—whether or not they are used to fulll a concentration
requirement—are used to calculate the nal honors average. If you are uncertain as to whether
a course counts into your nal honors average, consult the Undergraduate Program Oce.
Thesis: The numerical equivalents of the several elements of honors are assigned
according to the 4-point scale used by Harvard College to determine ranking lists.
Determining Honors
Each element - course grades and thesis - is converted into a number and then is averaged
into an overall number (either 2:1, course grades: thesis, or 6:3:1, course grades: thesis: oral
exam), again based on the same four-point scale.
Final Ranking
Students should understand that a nal “raw score” number does not translate directly into
an honors determination according to the same four-point scale. For example, if one’s course
grades, thesis, and oral exam (if taken) average to a raw score of 3.33, the student most likely
will not be recommended to receive High Honors for departmental honors. Historically, the
cuto point for a departmental recommendation of High Honors is signicantly above a raw score of
3.33 on the four-point scale.
The departmental decision is an art, not a science, and takes into account factors that
cannot be captured in a mathematical formula. Nor is the Department’s decision bound
by narrow precedents. Each year and each case is considered on its own merits, and the
decisions of one year do not bind the next. Thus there are and can be no precise and xed
minimum and maximum cutos for the dierent levels of honors.
Finally, it is important to note that the decisions on honors made by the Department at
the Honors Determination Meeting each spring are only recommendations to the College.
The recommendation that comes from the Government Department is called English hon-
ors (and will appear on the transcript) and the recommendation from the College is called
page 44 | Formatting, Submitting, and Grading
Latin honors (and will appear on the diploma and transcript). Students cannot receive a level
of Latin honors higher than the department’s recommendation for English honors, but they
may receive a level of Latin honors lower than the department’s recommendation. Gener-
ally, each year some Government students receive degrees with levels of honors lower than
those recommended by the Department. For information on College requirements, see the
Handbook for Students.
4.4 Thesis Prizes: Harvard-wide and Departmental
A quick overview
There are a number of thesis prizes (e.g., Hoopes) available to worthy undergraduate
thesis writers, many of which come with a cash reward attached. Most require the adviser
or the Department to nominate your thesis; some allow self-nomination. In the former in-
stance, the Undergraduate Program Oce will notify you if you are being considered for an
award and additional information is needed. Please note: it is inappropriate and unacceptable to ask
your thesis supervisor to nominate you for the Hoopes or any other prize. There are department-wide
criteria that are used to decide on thesis nominations. Supervisors have been asked to report any such
inappropriate requests to the DUS or Department Chair.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 45
page 46 | Formatting, Submitting, and Grading
end matter
The initial iteration of this guide was prepared by Nathan Paxton.
Subsequent revisions have been made by George Soroka, Cheryl Welch, Ellen Hart,
Francis Shen, Shauna Shames, Karen Kaletka, and Tricia Vio.
Thanks to the Harvard Writing Project for their support of this project. James
Herron and especially Kelsey McNiff provided insightful advice and assistance on the
structure and composition of this booklet. The Harvard Writing Project also provided a
Gordon Gray Faculty Grant to fund the writing and design of this thesis handbook.
Thanks to Bradley Zakarin, Ph.D., former Allston Burr Resident Dean for Mather
House and assistant director of undergraduate studies in history. His work on the senior
thesis guide for the History Department contributed greatly in structure and content to
this guide, and this work is immeasurably better for it. Thanks as well to Prof. Jay
Mechling, American Studies, U.C. Davis, for his ideas and suggestions on the chapter about
the writing process. The Undergraduate Program Office of the Government Department
would also like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kathleen Sheehan and Hugh
Truslow in revising the “Library Research” portion of this guide.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in Government | page 47
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Lynn, Andrea. 2004. Bush administration has used 27 rationales for war in Iraq, study says.
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style for students and researchers. 8th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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30th anniversary ed. New York: HarperCollins.
Department of Government
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Harvard University
Department of Government
Harvard University
1737 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: (617) 495-2148
Fax: (617) 495-0438
gov.harvard.edu
