Dialectical Journal Example
State & Local
1. Wyoming tried to attract women to its state by offering them the right to vote. I wonder if this policy worked? What effect did it have on Wyoming's politics? A policy like that might have made the decision to move out West more attractive to women but in that time, the wife was still the subordinates of her husband (based on the episodes of Dead Wood that I have watched).
Further, I don't think that many single women were like to say, "let's move to Wyoming so I can vote." One feminist justification that I have read about Wyoming's motivations were steeped in the idea that women were more moral than men. And if you let them vote, they might vote for politicians who will clean up politics, pass laws that will make attaining liquor more difficult, and outlawing prostitution.
2. Why are states different from each other? For example, why is it that someone who commits murder in one state can be condemned to death but will serve a life sentence if that act was committed in a different state? Why is it that in California people openly smoke marijuana and must hide the same activity in Alabama? The authors offer several reasons to explain the differences between the states, including geography and history, social forces, economic characteristics, and political values.
3. How do political scientists use hypotheses? Why? Rather than just going off of "hunches" or guesses, we can derive hypotheses from
theories and test them by using observations (data) to find out whether or not our understanding of the real world is correct.
4. Institutions seem to be an important to the authors. Why are they so important?Institutions are the rules that define how the game of government and politics is played. By understanding the rules we can use the rules to our advantage to get the policies we
prefer passed.
5. The authors write about the importance of reform, but is reform actually possible in states? Reform seems to be a pipe dream and overly optimistic. Look at states like Alabama, nothing seems to change. The same characters are constantly being reelected and we consistently have underfunded schools, bad health care, and poverty.
6. Why do the authors claim reform is possible, especially at the state level. How do they justify this claim? While there are things about the state that we cannot address, like the racial make up, where it is located, the weather, and other social factors, institutions are mutable (fancy word for "able to change"). The authors claim that, "people can reform their state's political institutions to make it easier to enact the politics that they desire" (17).
7. The finding that homogeneous states (like MN and VT) tend to be quite liberal is interesting to me. But why is it important? I suppose it says something about how people tend to be more generous with state monies when they go to people like themselves. Once people who do not look like them move in, people who are different, people tend to not be so generous.
8. Members of minority groups living in homogenous states (where they tend to have more liberal public policies) are worse off than those living in states that are more heterogeneous but are also way more conservative, like MS and MO. I need to think about why this is an important finding. Because in states where minorities are a very small part of the total population, they might have much less political clout than in states like Mississippi or Missouri, where they are better represented in the legislature.
9. Why do the authors propose the "COMPARATIVE Method" for studying state and local politics? The comparative method "helps explain the patterns of politics and public policy." We can learn a lot about Alabama politics by comparing it to the politics of other states.
10. The authors are using "hypotheses." I thought these were only used in science class - like biology and chemistry. We use hypotheses to test theories of political behavior. We might not always be right but if we are right most of the time, we consider it to be true. For instance, the South is conservative is a type of hypothesis that we can test and accept or reject.
Attachment:- Chapter.rar