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Literature Review Assignment and Advice

Assignment

Your literature review should be at least 6 pages in length (double-spaced, 12 point font, with 1 inch margins). It should organize the previous/relevant literature on your research topic/question into either approaches to studying your topic/question (or) a set of common cases/a root reading and its evolution in the scholarship (see below). The goal of this first draft is to start organizing your understanding of the literature early!

I will create a link to upload your literature review draft in the October 20 folder that way I can type responses to you rather than hand scrawl them. Please also post a draft on your group’s file exchange so you can start a discussion thread on literature review, where you can offer comments to your group members.

Advice

Lit reviews are intended to do three things for your research and reader.

First, they summarize (or “review”) the relevant literature on your topic. This does NOT mean that you will cite and summarize all the writing on your topic! Rather, a review is intended to give a sense of the major writings/research that has previously been done on your research question (or the broader topic). This is crucially important to establish what has been done as well as what your research will contribute. Your summary also helps prove to your readers that you are aware of the prior research.

Second, your literature review should organize the literature. As I suggested in our class there are three stock standard ways to organize your literature review (which I address below). The intention of these standard approaches is to organize the work of previous scholars into approaches or views of the topic/question. The works you include might not answer your specific question by they should shed some light on the direction of your research. See example of this in Koremenos et al.’s (2001) article, specifically the section “From Cooperation Theory to Rational Design”. Because you cannot review every bit of research on a topic/question, I encourage you to feel free to organize your review around the most relevant, most important writings. The one caveat to this encouragement is that you must make sure your review is not biased. By that I mean that it does not leave aside a whole approach or set of relevant, important writings just because they are not your favored approach (instead use them as a competing explanation).

Third, your literature review should lead your reader into what modified/new theory, or research design, you will use to research your question. This final step is crucially important because it makes your review more than a simple summary. Instead your review provides the reader insight into your understanding of how the study of your topic has evolved and what approaches prior scholars have applied to your question (or similar questions). In sum your literature review should make clear the different expectations that theoretical approaches (theories) have when they turn to explaining your puzzle, as well as, the record of research supporting those expectations.

For example, in my dissertation research I tried to answer the question “why do some states wait longer than others to ratify treaties?” I summarized realist, institutionalist, and liberalist scholarship on agreements. Next I illuminated what forces each approach saw as driving the decision to ratify (power, the structure of the treaty itself, the presence/absence of democratic government [and its composition]). Then, I made clear which types of states each view expected to wait longer, or forego ratifying the treaty all together (powerful states and their allies, states disadvantaged by the treaty, democracies, especially those with divided governments). I didn’t yet present my own theory (which involved elections and party politics – and would be introduced in the next section/chapter of the paper), but I strived to give my readers a clear view of how different scholars viewed the ratification of treaties.

Your literature review should strive to do the same thing. Now let me chart out some methods of organizing the vast and varied literature you are no doubt encountering.

Standard Organizational Choices

Option #1: By theory and chronology

Say you have three theoretical approaches that have been used to try to explain your question (or similar questions). Further, let’s imagine that in reviewing the individual sources you notice that some of these articles seem to address one another (see the “Relative Gains” readings for an example). One popular way to organize your literature review is by theory in order of when the authors working in that tradition started asking the question (or similar questions) your research focuses on.

Notice in my example above, I used this method. Realism is a venerable theory of international relations and focuses any explanation of behavior on the uncertainty of anarchy and the importance of power. So beginning in the 1940’s realist scholars started arguing that law (and thus treaties) were epiphenomenal, above the real phenomena that drove state interactions, namely: power! In response to realism, in the 1970-1980’s, institutionalism argued that agreements are a way to monitor cheating and re-enforce confidence between states that agreements will be kept. In a further response to institutionalism, liberalism (a new variety) arose in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, arguing explanations for international behavior are best found in the type of governments states have (e.g. democracy or non-democracy). In separating these three approaches, subtitles should be used to keep your discussion clear. See below:

Literature Review

Until recently, many scholars studied the signing of treaties as indicating their entry into force, but in fact that approach was flawed. Ratification marks the moment that legal obligations are assumed by the state and so…

Approach #1 Subtitle (e.g. Realism: The Powerful Do What They Will)

As the title above hints, Realist scholars approach treaties as agreements subject to the whims of the powerful…

Approach #2 Subtitle (e.g. Insitutionalism: The Treaty is the Thing)

Institutionalism studies treaties with special attention to how they solve particular problems of trust and uncertainty that states experience. Thus the specific provisions of the treaty, especially those that treat different states differently, are seen by institutionalists a forces that pull states towards a treaty or push them away.

Approach #3 Subtitle (e.g. Liberalism: How Finding Consensus is Difficult)

Taking a decidedly more domestic look at international law, Liberals focus instead on the government doing the ratifying…

Option #2: By cases and findings

The cases and findings approach works best when you have a literature that is divided into different “classical” or “crucial” case studies, wherein scholars might use common approaches but mostly divide themselves along lines of the phenomenon that they study. So let’s say you wanted to answer the questions: when and where has the non-governmental organization (NGO) Save the Children been most and least successful? And why? There are of course a number of theoretical approaches to understanding NGOs, but perhaps in your reading you notice that three other NGOs have received most of the scholarly attention (e.g. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam). You could then organize your literature review by what the scholarship on each of these other NGOs reveals about why NGOs (more generally) succeed or fail. So your outline would look like this:

Literature Review

Few studies have specifically analyzed Save the Children, but there is a robust literature on NGO success and failure. At the heart of this literature are analyses of three important NGOs…

Amnesty International

Amnesty international focuses on the political rights of individuals and tries to name and shame governments into respecting…

Human Rights Watch

As an NGO concerned with all human rights, Human Rights Watch set its sights on a broad array of abuses internationally…

Oxfam

Most similar to my own research question, Oxfam is a confederation of organization dedicated to combatting poverty…

Notice how each section lays out the basics of the other NGO, as well as its similarity or difference from the NGO at the heart of this example: Save the Children. Presumably the author here would go on to talk about different studies that have been done and different theoretical approaches used to examine each NGOs. Finally, this option will require you to have a “synthesis” section, wherein you offer your understanding of what different explanations can be drawn from these other NGOs that are applicable to your own study.

Option #3: A root reading and its evolution

Finally, you might have been inspired by a specific reading and want to test that reading’s theory out on a new set of political events. My own undergraduate honors thesis applied a reading (see “Rational Design of International Institutions Project” article), to a new set of cases (international human rights courts). This type of literature review keeps most of the focus on the specific theory/approach you want to examine. In doing so you can trace its history (e.g. is this theory a response to something, an alterative approach?) and its evolution since the original seminal work. This option requires that you include a transitional paragraph about how your test/application of this theory in a new case will add to this evolution. See an example based on my senior thesis below:

Literature Review

The cooperation literature often views the collaborations of states through the lenses of either powerful state design (most popularly framed hegemonic stability theory) or as purely interest driven. These approaches have run into several limitations…

The Rational Design of International Institutions: Understanding Institutional Variety

Koremenos et al. (2001) ask questions about the form cooperation takes, not just whether it occurs. To do this they create a framework…

Applications to International Arbitration

Mattli (2001) applies the RDIIP framework to international arbitration….

Applications to POWs

Morrow (2001) also applies RDIIP but to a normative institution: prisoners of war (POWs)…

In this paper, I use the RDIIP framework to examine and assess whether three different international human rights courts were “rationally” designed or simply designed in the interests of the most powerful states…

Notice how this option builds up an intellectual history of a specific theory/approach that is then applied to a specific research question that it hasn’t been applied to before.

Concluding Thoughts

Literature reviews are best if they are as brief, and yet as thorough, as possible (Irish 2016).

The “and yet” in that last sentence is what gets most students. The most common mistake is to treat the literature review as a quick exercise of citing two famous theorists and hoping to skate by on how those broad theories apply to your specific question.

Please don’t do this.

Instead, treat this as an exercise in getting the most specific theoretical explanation and empirical evidence possible for your topic. Paint a full picture of how scholars have wrestled with the issue you chose to research. This includes a full appreciation for the amount of political science research published every year (literally hundreds and thousands of articles). Remember our class example: 2 paragraphs, 23 citations!

The second most common mistake is to go overboard on reviewing literature, spending page after page recounting the accomplishments of others.

Please don’t do this.

You have interesting things to say, to write. Group prior work thoughtfully and with an eye toward a simple unifying explanation. Then, move on! Get to your theory of why (x) happened or, if you’re applying a theory a la option #3, start explaining why you chose these cases and what analyzing them will reveal.

Best of luck!

Irishout

� Ratification is the process by which a state legally binds itself to an agreement. In democracies, it usually involves a vote in the legislature. For example, the US requires a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate (67 yes votes) to ratify treaties that the President (or his/her representatives) negotiate. Incidentally this is one of the highest ratification voting requirements in the world!