The first question for a dissertation — and more so for a research paper — is how you focus your inquiry. If you were to explore a presidential
administration’s views on federalism, you would need some way of defining their views on federalism. For the Reagan administration, you could frame that under
the broad umbrella of “devolution” which was both an attitude that governed his administration’s general political outlook, and a specific policy initiative
that his administration undertook. And within the latter, there were different ways in which devolution was implemented in various policy domains. For a
dissertation, you could explore the idea of “devolution” or “the new federalism” — its origins, its chief architects, their influence on Reagan; you could
focus on the broad policy approach of devolution — the ideas and principles that formed it; you could focus on the way in which it was implemented within one
specific policy area — what laws/regulations/personnel were changed in order to allow power to revert to the states.
The second question for you to consider is whether the Obama administration did try to promote federalism. In my experience in the education policy arena
during his administration, his administration relied on the technique of the "Dear Colleague letter" by which the Department of Education transmitted letters
containing interpretive guidance on Department of Education civil rights regulations which effectively required school districts to fund certain kinds of
training with the stated goal of combatting harassment of the LGBTQ population. This would have had a nationalizing effect on the culture of public education,
rather than the effect of devolving power. But there may have been other policy domains in which his administration was more pro-federalist.
Regarding your research paper, I encourage you to do something that will be relevant to your dissertation.
I also encourage you to write a dissertation that connects three areas:
- Your personal motivations (some problem you want to solve, some policy you want to advocate, some area of knowledge you want to cultivate);
- Your professional background, expertise, and ambitions;
- The gaps or trends in academic literature.