Political Science 318
Strategy and Ethics in Election Campaigns
November 17, 2004

Assignment #5

This assignment asks you to assess the outcome of your assigned Senate race. You need to address two questions: Why did the victorious candidate win, and to what extent did each candidate in the race compromise his or her principles in pursuit of victory?

The first question requires you to consider competing explanations of the race's outcome. Immediately after Election Day, local political observers have undoubtably offered such explanations. Which of these explanations are more compelling? Which are less compelling? Why?

For the second question, you can consider a range of different concerns, including (but not limited to) the following: whether each candidate began the campaign with clear positions or principles, whether that candidate changed or dropped those positions or principles in an effort to win, and whether such a change helped or hurt the candidate.

To find explanations of the race's outcomes, you can turn to post-election accounts of the race in newspapers and political web sites (such as National Journal and CQ.com). When assessing these outcomes and the candidates' behavior, you can use any information about the race and state that you have acquired since the start of the semester. You should use strong reasoning and good evidence and examples.

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.
• Try to minimize the single and double quotation marks in your assignment (including possessives, e.g., Bush's). The word count program counts the HTML code underlying these question marks as additional words. Fortunately, other HTML code is not included in the word counts. Avoiding the quotations can give you more words to use for your 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 December 3. 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.