Political Science 311
Legislative Process
April 21, 2008

Paper #3

This assignment explores why Congress sometimes succeeds in passing a budget resolution, and sometimes fails to do so. You need to offer an argument and supporting evidence about why these different outcomes occur. Choose one year in which Congress passed a budget resolution, and another year in which Congress failed to do so. Write an essay in which you

• offer a coherent, unified argument explaining these different outcomes, and
• discuss the implications of your argument for current congressional discussions about the budget resolution and their prospects for success.

Your explanation should point to similar factors explaining congressional success or failure in the two years that you choose. The argument is less compelling if you suggest that different factors explain each year's outcome. Such an argument raises questions about whether each influence was important in both years.

As with previous essays, this assignment does not have a single "correct" answer. You need to put together a compelling argument, supported by strong, detailed evidence.

To find news account of budget resolutions and related roll call votes, you can turn to some of the electronic sources that we have used for past papers, such as Lexis-Nexis, Thomas, CQ Weekly, or the CQ Congress Collection.  Alternatively, you can take a step back toward the Stone Age and use the printed sources. The annual CQ Almanac provides excellent year-end summaries of issues before Congress. Also, consider the print version of CQ Weekly. At the end of each year, the publication provides an index that includes different issues that Congress has considered, along with the relevant stories and roll call votes during the previous year. 

The first page of your paper should contain only identifying information (i.e., your name, etc.); this information should not appear on other pages of your paper. The second page of your paper should contain the text of your essay. The paper should contain appropriate in-text citations for any sources used; the detailed bibliographic information for these citations should appear on the third page. If tables or figures help support your argument in the text, you can include these tables or figures on additional pages (with clear references in the text of your essay). Note that these tables and figures should contain numbers or images that do not fit into normal text; the tables and figures should not contain material that you were unable to include in the main text due to a lack of space.

Your paper should be typed, with 1-inch margins and a font no smaller than 10 point.  The paper can be either single- or double-spaced.  The maximum length for the text of your essay is one page; when grading, I will not read any material past the first page (except tables or figures and citation details).  The paper is due at 12:30 p.m. on May 7; please turn in a hard copy to the box on my office door (instead of emailing).  Papers turned in 10 minutes after 12:30 p.m. on May 7 will be considered late.  Paper grades are lowered by ten points (out of 100 total points) for each 24-hour period (after the start of class) that they are late.  Finally, the Honor Code covers this assignment; make sure that you pledge your work.