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BA Politics and International relations – 1st year undergraduate level

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BA Politics and International relations – 1st year undergraduate level. Guidance points – please contact if you are uncertain about anything – please ensure you take all these into consideration while writing the essay – open book type so please bare that in mind Use the literature review to justify the hypotheses (best done if you present your hypotheses after the literature review) • Example how to do this: – Suppose there is a theory of framing that argues that newspapers focus their coverage on ‘juicy’ revelations rather than information that would simply be useful for their readers (‘juicy revelations’ theory) – Describe this theory using multiple citations. This is going to be very abstract. This section would also define concepts as they are defined in the academic literature (e.g. what is meant by ‘juicy revelation’) – Derive hypotheses from it (e.g. “Newspaper coverage frames Covid-19 as an economic crisis when there is a public investigation into government’s economic policies.”) • • Starting paragraphs with topic sentences is extremely helpful to keep them focused Sign-posting and linking words also help to improve structure you do not need to provide references and you certainly should not include a bibliography. However, it is good practice to refer to academic sources as evidence of your engagement with readings and the relevant academic literature e.g., ‘Smith and Jones make precisely this point about it being a good idea to refer to academic sources in an exam but without needing to include precise references.’ Just because you have access to the internet and other sources during an open-book exam does not mean you should start including lots of quotations. We would not expect students to include lots of verbatim quotes in a traditional exam, and we do not expect this in openbook exams. If, for whatever reason, you do include a direct quote, make sure it is properly attributed e.g., ‘As Smith and Jones note, “all direct quotes should be in quotation marks and clearly attributed to the author(s).”’ Do not include a bibliography. Additipnal Guidance points • You can use multiple in-text citations at once: e.g. “as argued by Fischotter (2019) and Katze (2020)” • Try paraphrasing rather than quoting directly • To make it more exciting, try to find a ‘gap’ in the literature – No, it is not about a research area that was never explored before. It probably was. – It is more about the literature not considering certain independent variables / not testing the theory in certain context – To get even more bonus points, you may propose your own theory that explains something that couldn’t be explained by the previous theory. please read through with careful consideration Question: With reference to the material provided in Section B, what can you infer about online hostility towards British MPs? Which hypothesis – if any – receives the strongest support? Source Below please contact if you are finding any concerns SECTION B: This exam question is based on an MSc dissertation entitled ‘Abusive or uncivil? Investigating online hostility towards British MPs’ and the data were kindly made available by the researcher. Online hostility towards British MPs appears to be on the rise. Anecdotal evidence indicates that MPs from vulnerable societal groups are disproportionately targeted. This project seeks to test the effects of socio- demographic characteristics on abuse and incivility on Twitter. More precisely, it looks at the association between sociodemographic characteristics, abuse (hate speech, threats of violence and group stereotyping), and incivility (non- discriminatory forms of vulgarity, name-calling, pejorative speech and marginalisation). The following hypotheses are put forward: H1) Female MPs will be more likely to receive abuse and interpersonal incivility than male MPs H2) Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) MPs will be more likely to receive abuse and interpersonal incivility than non-BAME MPs. A total of 485,702 tweets for a sample of 26 MPs were collected between the 13th and 27th March 2019. Below the first 10 Tweets collected for three MPs – Amber Rudd, Clive Lewis and Dominic Raab – are shown. Their profiles are also described below. Tweets were classified into the following categories: abuse (tweets that included sexism, racism, homophobia, religious intolerance or threatened physical and/or sexual violence), interpersonal incivility (personally-directed tweets that exhibited profanity, name-calling and/or pejorative language) and affiliation incivility (uncivil tweets directed towards an MP’s collective political identification, rather than interpersonally). Tweets that did not fit the specified categories were coded as none.