Second Writing Assignment
Political Science 367

Your second assignment involves an analysis of political data. You will present recent data describing public opinion on a political topic or voting data from the recent presidential election. Your job will be to describe this information, and relate it to existing theory and research on political attitudes and behavior, as discussed in class and in Popkin's book The Reasoning Voter.

There are plenty of resources in the mass media and on the Internet presenting public opinion and voter behavior data. If you're having trouble finding such resources, check some of the links on the class website. You should identify a few results, trends, or patterns that are especially interesting to you, and present them in a table attached to your paper. Use the body of the paper to describe the results and analyze them using the ideas discussed in class and in the readings.

No outside reading, apart from the data themselves, is required for this assignment. You do not make need to reference or cite material presented in lecture. If you reference material presented in a Popkin's book, you only need to note the page number where that information may be found, in parentheses.

The paper should be 3-5 pages, double spaced (approximately 1000 – 1500 words). Tables do not count toward the page total.