First, read or skim the following articles about democracy promotion and development:
• Amartya Sen (1999) “Democracy as a Universal Value” Journal of Democracy
10 (3): 3–17
• Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzl (2009) “How Development Leads to Democracy: What We Know About Modernization”, Foreign Affairs
(March/April) available online at:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2009-‐03-‐01/how-‐development-leads-‐democracy
• Thomas Carothers. (2009) “Democracy Assistance: Political vs.
Developmental?” Journal of Democracy 20 (1): 5-‐19.
• Peter Burnell. (2008) “From Evaluating Democracy Assistance to Appraising
Democracy Promotion.” Political Studies, 56: 414–434
• Milja Kurki (2010) “Democracy and Conceptual Contestability: Reconsidering Conceptions of Democracy in Democracy Promotion”, International Studies
Review 12 (3): 362 – 386
• Rita Abrahamsen (2004) “The World Bank’s Good Governance Agenda: Narratives of Democracy and Power”, Ethnographies of Aid, Exploring Development Texts and Encounters (Occasional Papers, no. 24) available online at: http://rossy.ruc.dk/ojs/index.php/ocpa/article/view/3879 Second, using these texts write a 500 – 1,000 word literature review that sets up and justifies an original, specific, answerable research question that could be answered using qualitative methods. The assessment criteria for this task are below.
Assessment Criteria:
• Clarity of understanding of articles provided
• Appropriateness and specificity of research question generated in response
to the articles
• Clarity of how the research question is related to important debates in the literature
• Originality and persuasiveness of own intervention into debates
• Logic and structure of overall argument
• Appropriateness of suggestions to make a contribution to existing knowledge
(as represented by the articles) including any methodological suggestions
Pro Tips
Here are some tips, questions and ideas that might help:
• You might already have a research question in mind when you start reading, or the question might come to you as you read. Either way, your engagement with the texts should help you develop and refine your question and think of possible hypotheses, hunches and research strategies.
• When you try to generate a research question, consider: can you think of any unanswered questions in these articles? For example: o are there any correlations discussed where the causal mechanism has not been carefully empirically investigated?
o do any articles suggest new ways of conceptualising or measuring key concepts that might cast doubt on other articles or open up new lines of enquiry?
o thinking about your reading for the Intro to Qual Methods course, are there any methodological approaches that have not been used to research this topic or have been used inadequately? What could an improved methodological focus bring to our understanding of this topic?
• Don’t provide bland summaries of the articles. Instead, try to structure your review around a key set of debates that are relevant to your research question. Don’t worry about explaining the authors’ positions on anything that isn’t relevant. Choose your quotes, examples and explanation of the authors’ position to develop your own argument. You don’t necessarily have to reference every article, but it’s best to have skimmed them all in case they say something relevant. (This last point took me a long time to learn!)
• Explain to the reader why your research question is important in light of the existing literature.
• When you discuss the literature in your review, be critical and analytical, but don’t attack a “straw man”: make sure you don’t caricature or misrepresent the position you are critiquing.
• When planning your written work, you could imagine that you and all the authors of these papers are at a dinner together discussing the research question you have generated. What do all the authors have to say about that question? Which authors agree with each other and which disagree? Where are the debates and alliances around the table? What do you have to say? Now can you write up this conversation in a logical, structured way as your literature review?
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