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Milestone 1 – Project Idea

Brainstorm a topic or concept in political behavior that interests your group. Consider how this topic could influence citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors, particularly in the context of American electoral campaigns.

  • Need inspiration? Explore published journal articles in the ANES Bibliography to see examples of research questions, methods, and findings.

Objectives

By completing this milestone, you should:

  1. Become familiar with the Typst platform and syntax.
  2. Begin developing academic writing skills, including framing research questions and articulating the relevance of a topic.
  3. Start identifying a research focus for your project, with clear connections to political behavior and electoral campaigns.

Tips for Success

  • Focus on specific concepts (e.g., partisanship, voter mobilization, political socialization) rather than very broad topics.
  • Think about measurable outcomes, how might this concept affect voter attitudes, turnout, or candidate evaluation?
  • Review examples in the ANES Bibliography to see how researchers link concepts to empirical questions.

Instructions

The Setup

Before you can start this milestone, you need to have a typst account. You need to use typst to write, save and share your work.

The Milestone

  1. Create an Empty Document on the typst.app.
  2. Write a summary paragraph of your project idea.
    • Your idea is related to american political behaviour and/or public opinion.
    • You introduce a puzzle, mention what your research question is and formulate a hypothesis based on what you know today.
    • Format your in-text citations using the APA format.
    • Add a tentative research project title above your paragraph.
  3. Use Google Scholar or Cairn to identify two scientific articles published in major academic journals.
    • You need to use (cite) at least two scientific articles in your summary paragraph.
  4. Add a "References" section at the end of paragraph with your references.

Bonus: Can you include links to each of the references by linking them to the webpages of the scientific articles?

Submission Guidelines

  1. When you have completed your milestone, export your work from Typst as both:
    • a .pdf version of your milestone
    • the .typ source file
  2. Submit both files together in the General Chat.
  3. File Naming: To help keep submissions organized, use a consistent format such as:
da-milestone1-group1.typ
da-milestone1-group1.pdf

This keeps it easy to identify your files and ensures nothing gets lost.