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Summaries articles PSRM IDoing a literature review
J.W. Knopf (2006)
Literature review
• Summarizing and evaluating a body of writings about a specific topic
• 2 key elements
o It should concisely summarize the findings or claims that have emerged from prior
research efforts on a subject
o It should reach a conclusion about how accurate and complete that knowledge is; it
should present your considered judgements about what’s right, what’s wrong,
what’s inconclusive, and what’s missing in the existing literature
• Benefits
o Give a general overview of a body of research with which you’re not familiar
o Can reveal what has already been done well, so that you do not waste time
‘reinventing the wheel’
o Can give new ideas for you own research
o Can help determine where there are problems or flaws in existing research
o Can enable you to place your research in a larger context, so that you can show what
new conclusions might result from your research
3 contexts for literature reviews
• An end in and of itself
o One wants to ascertain the current ‘state of the art’ on a particular subject or
problem
o Not only summarizing the available research, but also critically evaluating
• A preliminary stage in a larger research project
o Investigating if the proposed research question is not already been answered
o Providing an overview of existing scholarship and explaining how your proposed
research will add to or alter the existing body of knowledge
• A component of a finished research report
o Literature review will generally involve building on and/or revising the literature
review completed at the proposal stage → purpose is to help show how your final
conclusions relate to the prior wisdom about your subject
Ways to frame the contribution to knowledge
• Knowledge refers to beliefs, in particular beliefs that some individuals have a degree of
confidence in due to study or experience
• Thinking of knowledge as having 2 elements: what we believe and how strongly we believe it
→ Bayesian statistics
• This provides a framework for thinking about the possible consequences of new research
Consider casting your net widely
• Besides traditional literature review, one should consider other sources such as
o Government agencies
o International governmental organizations
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, o Non-governmental organizations
o Think tanks
o Independent, freelance researchers
o Internet, but there is no peer review usually
Pointers on how to create an effective review
1. Read some existing review essays to see how other researchers have carried out this task
2. For each research study you read for your review, be sure you can succinctly summarize the
study’s main claim
3. Your written review should be selective
4. When you write a literature review, do not simply summarize item by item each publication
you have read: impose some intellectual order on the material
5. Think about grouping individual studies into larger ‘schools of thought’
6. While seeing how others have characterized a field of research is helpful, it is essential not to
rely on others’ summaries of existing studies
7. Get into the habit of associating individual authors and major camps or points of view with
each other
The nuts and bolts: what questions should the literature review try to answer?
• Most literature reviews must address 4 tasks or sets of questions
o To be clear about what each item you are reviewing was trying to do
o Identifying the main argument in each work
o Summarizing existing studies in terms of 3 categories
▪ Areas of consensus or near-consensus
▪ Areas of disagreement or debate
▪ Gaps
o Evaluating the overall state of knowledge on a topic, consider evaluating the
following
▪ Their assumptions
▪ Their logic
▪ Their evidence
▪ Their methodology
The problem of too few sources and the problem of too many sources
• Solved by thinking in terms of 2 tiers (or circles)
o In the first tier your are concerned with studies that directly address your own
proposed research question
o In the second tier you broaden your review to consider publications that are relevant
to or overlap some part of your own question, even though they do not directly
address the same point
▪ Thinking in terms of analogies: are there situations or problems that are
similar to the one you want to study, so that research on those other
problems might contain relevant ideas
▪ Problem of too many sources: use one or more of the following rules of
thumb for selecting literature
• Focus on the leading authorities
• Focus on recent studies from high prestige or high-visibility sources
2
, • Focus on the studies that are most relevant and helpful for your
question of interest
The bottom line
• A literature review should concisely summarize from a set of relevant sources the collective
conclusions most pertinent to your own research interests → evaluating the state of
knowledge in terms of
o What’s right
o What’s wrong
o What’s an area of uncertainty or debate that cannot be resolved using the existing
research
o What’s missing because no one has yet considered it carefully
The Populist Zeitgeist
C. Mudde (2004)
Defining populism
• 2 dominant interpretations of the term populism in public debate
o Referring to the politics of the Stammtisch (the pub), i.e. a highly emotional and
simplistic discourse that is directed at the ‘gut feelings’ of the people
o Populism is used to describe opportunistic policies with the aim of (quickly) pleasing
the people/voters – and so ‘buying’ their support – rather than looking (rationally)
for the ‘best option’
• Mudde defines populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated
into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’,
and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will)
of the people”
o In this definition, populism has 2 opposites:
▪ Elitism → this is populism’s mirror-image: it shares its Manichean worldview,
but wants politics to be an expression of the views of the moral elite, instead
of the amoral people
▪ Pluralism → rejects the homogeneity of both populism and elitism, seeing
society as an heterogeneous collection of groups and individuals with often
fundamentally different views and wishes
• Populism is only a ‘thin-centred ideology’, exhibiting ‘a restricted core attached to a
narrower range of political concepts’
• Populism is moralistic rather than programmatic → essential is the normative distinction
between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’, not the empirical difference in behaviour or attitudes
• Populism in this sense is not defined on the basis of a special type of organization, i.e.
charismatic leadership or as a special style of communication, i.e. without intermediaries →
charismatic leadership and direct communication between the leader and ‘the people’ are
common among populists, but these features facilitate rather than define populism
• Concept of heartland: it is a place ‘in which, in the populist imagination, a virtuous and
unified population resides’
o This concept of heartland helps to emphasize that the people in the populist
propaganda are neither real nor all-inclusive, but are in fact a mythical and
constructed sub-set of the whole population (‘imagined community’) → this
heartland is rather vague and can differ from country to country
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