Assignment task:
A major political party in the US is writing a plank in its platform about the environment. (A party's platform is its statement of central concerns and broad approaches to those concerns, with each point called a plank.) The platform will be released to the public in six months, and the hope is that it will persuade voters that your party cares about the issues they care about and that your party is ready and able to address them. You are a member of the team tasked with crafting the platform, and you recommend hiring a sociologist to assist with the work of understanding what voters want. Others on the team question this decision. Defend it. (For the purposes of this assignment, you may choose a real political party operating in the US, if you like, or you may write more generally about the value of a sociologist to any political party. You are not being graded on which party you choose but on how effectively you argue for the incluson of a sociologist to help the political party understand voters' concerns about the environment.)