Sample abstract

Since you must write an abstract (250 words maximum) for your seminar paper, I'm including a sample abstract for you to look at. You can also find some in various places. The abstract I'm including is for the paper I'll present in April at a political science conference, so I don't expect yours to be entirely similar. But notice that all it does is tell the country, topic, and general idea of what kind of argument/evidence I'll be looking at. It's also, by the way, only 182 words.

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This paper considers the effects of the change in Bolivia’s electoral system from list proportional (list-PR) to mixed-member proportional (MMP). One of the most noticeable implications of the 1994 change was the increased regionalization of Bolivian politics. Another implication was the party system’s fragmentation. Prior to the change, Bolivian politics revolved around a stable, moderate multiparty system organized around two blocks (MNR and ADN-MIR). In the two elections following the change to MMP, the country’s electoral system has fragmented, centered on regionally entrenched and antagonistic parties. Using statistical analysis of disaggregate electoral data from each of the country’s five elections (three prior to MMP, two after MMP), this paper establishes that the increasingly important regional cleavages are correlated to the change to MMP, and argues that this was a contributing factor to the dramatic overthrow of then-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003. Such a finding gives great reason to question the recent popularity of MMP by the discipline’s “institutional engineers.” While regional differences existed throughout Bolivia’s democratic experience, these were increasingly strengthened and polarized after the change to MMP.