There is still some confusion among some of you about what is expected in the essay. (Understandably so, since you are expected to do something quite challenging). For example, some of you have asked whether you should focus on the countries you were assigned. The answer is NO! You are supposed to look at broad patterns, not just the three countries you were given, except insofar as your experience gathering data for your countries is important for evaluating the quality of the data generated by the rest of the class, or there is something really special about your countries. The question is “what is the correlation between economic growth and state control [or democracy]?” in general, not just in the three countries you were asked to investigate. Think statistically: are there general patterns, despite obvious differences among countries? And do these general patterns have something to do with the political regime, as measured by your index?
A good way to structure the essay (but not the ONLY way, mind you) would be as follows:
Introduction. The essay could be introduced as a report on a research project to investigate and test the relationship between state control [or democracy] and economic growth. This is the question you are investigating: what is this relationship? Anticipate the overall plan of the essay and conclusions here. This is also the place where you can mention what your vague ideas about this relationship were before you did any research or thought much about it.
Section 1: Hypothesis. This section would discuss the expected relationship between economic growth and state control [or democracy], drawing either on the readings (Easterly and/or Bueno de Mesquita et al, primarily, though other readings apply), or on other data (see my posts here and here), or other research, or even on some idiosyncratic theory of yours. What would we expect to see, given those ideas?
Section 2: Methods and results. This section would describe the index created to investigate the question and the data-gathering process (“we selected an index with these characteristics, because these were thought to be associated with democracy or state control [though you might want to say you disagreed with the particular index], and countries were randomly assigned to all students in the class, who then proceeded to mostly use Wikipedia to find the appropriate info” - think of your own and others' experience here), and discuss the results of the exercise: is there a relationship? How can we tell? (Use examples, descriptions of patterns in the graphs, statistical summaries, or anything else that might help, including other graphs or tests of your own devising).
Section 3: Analysis and Discussion. Here you have to think about whether your expectation (section 1) was or was not confirmed (section 2). If it was not confirmed, why was that? (Maybe the theories in section 1 were wrong. Maybe the index is not the appropriate instrument for testing this relationship. Maybe the data is unreliable - too much Wikipedia, or too little training. Maybe the methods were inappropriate – we needed more years, or more precise questions, and a longer dataset. Maybe we don’t have the appropriate tools to test the relationship. Maybe the question is not properly posed, or is meaningless!). If it was confirmed, can we be sure that state control [or democracy] is driving this relationship? (Maybe other things are going on that are associated with democracy. Are there manipulations of the data that would let you discount some possibilities?).
Conclusion. Conclude by summarizing the results of your analysis: e.g, the data does/does not allow us to say with any certainty that there is some relationship of this kind, and suggests that the relationship is/is not driven by democracy, so that we can say that democracy is/is not associated with some sort of economic growth etc. You can mention here anything you think you learned about the process of trying to investigate this relationship (about, for example, the difficulties of data gathering, the process of constructing indexes of democracy, the quality of numerical data in politics, the challenges of trying to figure out what causes what, etc.)
At any rate, you are all more than welcome to e-mail me or come see me in my office (or talk to your tutors) about the essay, as well as discuss it with your classmates. As I've said before, this is a hard question, and definitive answers are hard to find. (There is no "right answer" out there that we can tell with certainty is beyond question, though there are better and worse answers). If you can show that you can think carefully and critically about what's involved in trying to make general statements about the relationship between political regimes and other important things, your essay will be good.
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