This is the second paper written for my American Political Institutions course. Our readings for this week focused on Congressional policymaking, namely the logic behind it. The prevailing theory for explaining legislators’ actions centers on rational decisions aimed at securing re-election. Many factors play into the decision making process, including constituent needs, personal policy preferences, and party alignment. But they all are weighed in accordance with their ability to get the legislator re-elected.

Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution grants Congress the right to establish their own procedural rules. Combine this with self-interest and you can imagine a framework would evolve that maximizes positive perception while minimizing costs of legislative decisions. There are specific tactics legislators employ to prevent their constituents from discovering the true, almost always negative, effects of a policy decision. The goal of any of these tactics is to reduce the traceability back to a particular legislator to avoid electoral accountability. What my paper focuses on is how citizens could use the Internet to maximize traceability.

This is the writing sample I cooked up for my grad school application. I’m embarrassed to say, before this, I hadn’t written a research paper in many years. For my first go in a while, I did alright. It was a lot of fun to write and I learned a bunch about present media consumption on the Internet. I may update it, but that depends on time.

This is the statement of purpose I included in my grad school application to the University of Maryland. Like most of my writings, as soon as I submitted this I noticed fifty things I would have changed about it. C’est la vie.