Where Do Research Ideas Come From?

Ideas for projects can come from almost anywhere. However, rarely do they come from out of the blue. They come from thinking about politics and why it works the way it does. They come from engaging the ideas of others. They come from noticing contradictions, puzzles, or tensions in the way people think and write about politics. Sometimes they come from noticing where so-called conven- tional wisdom conflicts with observed behavior. They can come from anywhere, but they certainly come from somewhere.

A great place to start for graduate students is the existing published literature on a topic. Reading that literature in a critical and active way will allow you to identify gaps, conflicts, and contradictions. Many students are taught that the literature tells us what we know about a topic. That is a reasonable starting point, but actively engaging the literature, questioning what it says, and challenging the methods that have been employed should really tell us what we don’t know about a topic as well. The list of things we don’t know is a good starting point for a list of possible research projects.

In the discussion regarding graduate seminars in Chapter 4, I advocate for writing a critical 1-2 page reaction paper in response to each week’s readings. I further encourage concluding that paper with one or two research ideas that emerge from your critique. If you do this for every week of every seminar you take, you will have scores, possibly hundreds, of research ideas. They won’t be fully developed, and many may prove to be useless, but you will still be left with plenty of ideas worth pursuing. More importantly, you will be developing your ability to identify and articulate research ideas.

Sometimes ideas come from exploring the tension between conventional wis- dom in two different areas. For example, I have published several papers with Geoff Layman on party polarization, focused specifically on a process we call conflict extension. One of the motivators for this work was recognizing that the dominant view of party identification at the individual level emphasized how sta- ble party identification tends to be. At the same time, the dominant view in the literature on aggregate party change emphasized that periods of significant change, often called party realignments, involved people switching parties rather than changing issue preferences when the two of them were in conflict. So the lit- erature on aggregate party change seemed to rest on a microlevel model that was

in conflict with the dominant view of microlevel party identification. Puzzling about this tension helped motivate our work. Had we stayed within either of these traditions, we may not have seen this tension.

Conversations with classmates, colleagues, mentors, and others are a great way to generate new ideas and flesh out the ideas you already have. Playing with and discussing ideas is one of the best parts of being a scholar. However, I would make three points about having such conversations.

1. Talking about research ideas is not the same as writing about them. Most of us cannot keep an entire argument in our heads. We skip over things or miss potential problems when we talk about our research that we only discover when we sit down to write about it systematically. Talking is necessary, but not sufficient.

2. You need to be clear about fair use of ideas generated from conversations. If a friend generates an idea, are they simply helping you with your paper, are they generating an idea for a possible co-authored paper, or are they sharing one of their own ideas upon which they plan to work? It is a good idea to make sure everyone is clear about the purpose of the conversation and how you plan to proceed. If it seems like someone gave you an idea, ask whether it is okay for you to use it. It is much better to avoid later misunderstandings by being clear up front.

3. The flipside of the previous point is to consider how much of your own ideas you feel comfortable sharing in a particular conversation. My default posi- tion is to share ideas openly with whomever is interested. However, I have had a personal experience where I shared ideas about what I was working on with someone at a conference only to hear that person express my ideas as their own later on. Young scholars in particular often have concerns about their ideas being taken or someone publishing a paper that steals their thun- der from their own work. Many students worry about this particularly in regards to their dissertation. Again, I think most of the time it is quite safe to share your ideas with others, but there are some circumstances where you might want to limit sharing your ideas at the early stages of a project to people you know and trust.

As I have said, developing ideas depends at least as much on thinking about what we don’t know as it does considering what we do know. However, remember

that you also must consider the potential value of addressing something that we don’t know. To my knowledge, very little research has been published on the role of Lieutenant Governors in the state policymaking process. That alone is not a sufficient reason for doing such research, however. What can we learn from doing this research that helps us understand policymaking more generally? Why would someone who does not care at all about Lieutenant Governors still want to read your paper?