Research Report

For your paper, you should select a particular policy.Your policy can be a specific law, ordinance, legislative proposal, regulation, or court decision.You should provide an authoritative source for the policy, for example, a city code, state statute, administrative regulation, or federal law.

Requirements

The paper should be approximately 12 pages long, and should focus on a scholarly discussion of the outlined sections. Your briefing paper should accurately describe each perspective. Your goal is to both provide your audience with concise, accurate summaries of the key theoretical arguments related to a specific policy, and to identify how the perspectives get translated into a political party’s policy position.

Your paper should have the following sections:

I. Introduction:Provide a preview of the contents of the paper.

II. Policy Description:

III. Libertarian Approach

1. Overview of libertarianism

2. Libertarians’ view of the policy

IV. Conservative Approach

1. Overview of conservatism

2. Conservatives’ view of the policy

V. Socialist Approach

1. Overview of socialism

2. Socialists’ view of the policy

VI. Modern Liberal Approach

1. Overview of modern liberalism

2. Modern liberals’ view of the policy

VII. Policy Recommendation

Based on the above analyses, what would you recommend with respect to the policy?Continue, revise, or repeal?

VII. Conclusion:Provide a summary of the contents of the paper.

Additional Instructions for the Sections

For each of the ideological perspectives, you will write two sections:

Overview of the Perspectives

For each of the theoretical sections, you should present an overview of the theory from the prospective of advocates of the perspective.For example, for libertarianism, you should report how libertarians explain their perspective.This means that you should not include criticisms of the perspectives in these sections.If you are unsure if a source is supporting or criticizing one of the perspectives, please check with me.

You should save criticisms of the perspectives for the policy recommendation section that comes next-to-last in the paper.When making your policy recommendation, you should explain how your recommendations relate to the political economy perspectives.Which perspective(s) support your recommendations?Which perspective(s) are inadequate or inappropriate for your policy?

Views of the Policies

In this section, you will explain how proponents of each perspective view the policy you are analyzing.For this section, do not speculate about how proponents view your policy.Instead, read what proponents say about your policy.For example, what do libertarians say about current education policy?Do they support existing policies?What changes do they want?Again, don’t speculate, find appropriate sources, and report what they say.