e United States is more complicated.
With polls showing that more than eight of 10 adult Americans favor ratification of the CTBT (Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, 1999), the simple solution to the problem for the American voting public would be to withhold their votes from Republican senatorial candidates. Quite obviously, such behavior has not occurred at a frequency that would lead to a solution to the problem of ratification of the CTBT. Thus, while the actual vote against CTBT ratification may be explained by rank partisanship in the Senate, the Republican senators must know something about American voters that is not reflected in the polls showing 80 percent support for the CTBT to justify the thumbing of their collective nose at the American voting public on this issue. The research design proposed herein is intended to find out what it is that Republican senators know about the American voter that permits them to engage in what appears to many people to be petulant, irresponsible, and dangerous behavior in an attempt to get even with a president that has managed to effectively dodge every would be knockout punch that the Republicans in Congress have thrown at him.
The empirical research design proposed is presented in 10 topic areas. These topic areas are as follows; (1) the research question; (2) the research hypothesis; (3) the research design type; (4) the importance of the issue to be investigated; (5) a review of relevant literature; (6) data sources; (7) proposed statistical methods for data analysis; (8) type of data display proposed; (9) discussion of challenges and obstacles encountered in researching this issue; and (10) implications for further study.
The research question that will be investigated will not be why the CTBT ratification vote failed in the United States Senate. There would be no point in investigating this question, because everyone knows that the vote was almost exclusively along part...