Political Science 318
Strategy and Ethics in Election Campaigns
August 30, 2004

Assignment #1

For this first assignment, you will need to collect information on one aspect of the campaign context of your assigned Senate race, and then post that information as a web page.

The assignment focuses on six aspects of campaign context: issues important to the state, media market(s) and geography, candidate backgrounds, other races, political history, and economic and social characteristics. As a first step in completing the assignment, meet with the other five people assigned to your Senate race. As a group, you need to decide who will investigate each aspect of campaign context; each group member should focus on one aspect. After choosing topics, each student should complete the rest of the assignment individually.

Next, investigate your assigned state and Senate race, focusing on your chosen aspect of campaign context. You can turn to a variety of sources for information about campaign context; I list several possible sources here. You need to collect sufficient information so that you can (1) provide a detailed description of this aspect of campaign context, and (2) explain how the aspect may affect your assigned Senate race.

For more information on campaign context, refer to chapter 3 of the Shea and Burton book. They describe many different aspects of campaign context, including the six listed above. Shea and Burton also suggest how the various aspects may affect election campaigns.

When describing specific characteristics of a state or individual, your evidence is stronger if you provide a baseline against which you compare that individual or state. This baseline helps you make the case that the state or individual is unusual in some way, and that the uniqueness therefore is relevant for the Senate race.

Make sure that you pay attention to the following suggestions:

• Complete the assignment early enough that your group leader can post your work to the class web page.
• Avoid partisan bias as much as possible.
• Feel free to improve your evaluation by using links to video clips or other presentational material that can not be part of assignments submitted on paper.
• After posting your work, check the word count. Going over the 500-word limit will lower your grade for the assignment.

The Honor Code covers this assignment. You should pledge your work by including in the assignment a statement that you have followed the Honor Code in completing the assignment (to save words, you can include this statement on a separate page that is linked to the main page for your assignment). Your page should contain appropriate in-text citations for any sources used. The detailed information for each citation should then appear in a bibliography on another web page (that is linked to the page containing the text of your assignment). The assignment is due at the start of class on September 6. In other words, you should post your page by 2:30 p.m. on this day. Assignments posted more than 10 minutes after the scheduled start of a class period will be considered late. Assignment grades are lowered by 10 points (out of a total 100 points) for each 24-hour period (after the start of class) that they are late.