Top marks for Merton PPE student

Second-year History and Politics student Sarah Bosworth has been awarded the highest mark in the Quantitative Politics module for Political Sociology across the University. The second-highest mark also went to a Merton second-year PPE undergraduate, Taco Prins.

The task set for the students was to scrutinise an article from the course reading list in terms of the methodology and data that the academic had used to base their conclusions upon. Sarah chose an article by Ladd and Lenz (2009) that uses survey data to suggest that when The Sun newspaper switched its allegiance from backing the Conservatives to Labour in 1997, this had a significant effect on the voting behaviour of those who consistently read the paper.

Sarah explained her approach:

"My critique argued that Ladd and Lenz had made their conclusions on too small a sample size; they had wrongly tried to alleviate this drawback by including readers of three other newspapers whose switch in allegiance was much more subtle than The Sun. This led to a conflation of factors and a reduction the validity of their claims. Thus, I argued that they were wrong to argue that the political message from the newspaper alone can be seen as directly causal for having changed voter behaviour."

Sarah will be presented with a small prize by the College in recognition of her achievement.