Political science personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Last autumn our local council held a consultation on changing the bus route that serves my sixth form. The notice went up in the library and on a webpage most people I knew had never visited. Thirty-one people responded. The route changed anyway, and for a while I was simply annoyed. Then I became curious about the mechanics: who decided that thirty-one responses counted as consultation, what the councillors were actually obliged to consider, and why the people most affected were the least likely to be in the room. That question is the reason I want to study political science rather than simply follow politics as news. I am less interested in who wins an election than in the rules, incentives and institutions that shape what happens between elections. Reading around the subject has given me language for this. Studying the idea of agenda setting made me see that power often lies in deciding what gets discussed at all, which fits the bus consultation better than any argument about individual politicians. Robert Dahl's question about who governs, and his attention to different groups holding influence in different policy areas, changed how I read our council: housing, licensing and transport seem to have quite different sets of active participants. I also find the comparative side compelling, because it forces claims to be tested. In History I have written about the collapse of Weimar democracy, and I was struck that explanations depending on German national character explain nothing once you compare other interwar states under similar economic strain. I want to work with evidence rather than impressions, which is partly why I chose Mathematics alongside two essay subjects. I expect the degree to be demanding in exactly this way: asking me to define contested terms carefully, to read authors I disagree with properly, and to accept that a plausible story is not the same as a supported argument. I would like eventually to work in policy research or local government, but my more immediate reason is that these questions genuinely occupy me, and I would rather spend three years on them with proper supervision than keep circling them alone.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A-levels give me three useful and quite different habits of thought. History has trained me in handling disputed evidence: my coursework compares historians' explanations of the 1832 Reform Act, and I had to justify why I found arguments about elite self-preservation more convincing than accounts centred on popular pressure, without pretending the evidence was one-sided. That process of weighing rival interpretations is close to what I understand political analysis to involve. Sociology introduced me to research methods in a formal way, including sampling, the difference between correlation and causation, and the problem of response bias. I now notice these issues constantly in reporting of polls, and I learned the hard way in my own small survey that a self-selecting sample tells you little about a population. Mathematics is the subject I work hardest at and, I think, the one that will matter most unexpectedly. Statistics has given me confidence with distributions and significance, and the discipline of laying out a proof step by step has made my essay paragraphs tighter: I have become suspicious of sentences that assert a link without showing it. Outside the syllabus I read fairly widely, mostly from the library and free online sources. I found Bryan Caplan's argument about voter irrationality provocative and only partly convincing, because it seems to underrate how little information voters are actually given. I have also worked through introductory material on electoral systems and drafted a short comparison of first past the post and the single transferable vote for our sixth form politics society, which taught me how hard it is to explain a threshold effect clearly to an audience that has not thought about it before. I attended a free online lecture series on comparative government last summer and kept notes on the treatment of federalism, which I still return to.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

The project I am proudest of cost nothing but time. Since last October I have read the published minutes of my borough council's planning committee and recorded, in a spreadsheet, the ward, the type of application, the number of public objections and the outcome. I have around ninety decisions logged. I am careful about what this shows: the sample is small, I cannot control for the merits of each application, and objection counts depend on who knew to object. Even so, patterns emerged that I would not have guessed, particularly that objections cluster heavily in a few wards while others produce almost none. I attended two committee meetings in person, which was more revealing than the minutes, because the summary of a discussion loses the hesitations and the moments where officers effectively settle a question before members speak. I wrote it up as a short report for my History teacher, who pushed me to be clearer about what I could and could not claim. Alongside this I work Saturdays in a bakery, serving customers and cashing up. It sounds unrelated, but standing behind a counter in the same neighbourhood I was researching gave me a steady sense of what people actually talk about, and taught me to be brisk, accurate and patient when the queue is long. At home I collect my younger brothers from school three days a week and supervise homework, which has made me organised by necessity; my revision happens in defined blocks rather than when I feel like it. At sixth form I help run the debating group, where I look after fixtures and try to make sure newer members speak in at least one round. Arguing positions I do not hold has been genuinely useful: preparing a case against compulsory voting forced me to take turnout inequality seriously as a problem rather than a slogan. I come to this degree used to working independently and ready to be corrected.

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