• Anonymous
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We’ll look at the style of politics question that may be asked. For example, if you have referenced a particular current event in your personal statement, your interview might start with a quick discussion on that.

For instance, if I wrote about the constitutional implications of Britain leaving the European Union, I may be asked about how I think the renegotiation process is likely to unfold, or maybe asked whether I anticipate Brexit as creating an impetus for a second referendum on Scottish independence. However, your interview may be focused on political science or political theory, and you maybe set a little problem to work through that. And so I’ll give you a little bit of a problem to work through. The kind of mixes these two strands of political signs and political theory.

So let’s take an imaginary country and that’s called Dragonstone. So in this country citizens have settled tasks, and they have set jobs by the government. They’re not allowed to own their own property; they cannot speak out against the way the country is being run; they do, however, get to elect a president, but this is only every eight years. There is a choice of candidates although, the candidates have to be friendly towards the regime to be eligible to stand. So the question that I’d like you to answer and work through is whether or not this country Dragonstone is, in fact, a democracy.

So what we’re going to want to try and do, is to break this down and to try to defend our own conception of what the essence of democracy is. So in an initial attempt to answering the question may involve something like, oh it's clearly democracy as they can choose the presidents. But as we can see, this seems like an overly simplistic answer. For example, the president might have no powers to enact legislation, or maybe constantly overruled by an unelected Senate for instance. Furthermore, we might be weary that only friends of the regime can run for president. We might want to ask the interviewers some questions about how the electoral franchise works in Dragonstone.

You might ask the interviewer “Oh in order to help me onto this question on whether Dragonstone is a democracy, can all citizens vote for the president?” So the interviewer might reply, “Yes. However there are a limited number of adults that are citizens and are therefore eligible to vote. So, given that we now know this, we might go back and change our answer when we have said earlier that Dragonstone clearly is a democracy, since very few adults can actually vote for the president. 

Another way would be to say that it clearly isn’t a democracy, as there is not free speech, that people can’t speak out against the way the country is being run. You might feel that this is a really key part of a conception of democracy. You might say that people’s free choices are sufficiently constrained, they can’t choose their own employment and so that dragon stone is not a democracy.

Here the interviewer could challenge you, and say that these are peripheral features typically associated with pre-existing liberal democracies today. They’re not really integral to the very notion of democracy, but rather are important for assessing whether a country is a liberal democracy.

I think my own view is that, we need to know a little bit more information and ask a few more questions about Dragonstone inaugural, in order for us to make a judgment on it. For instance, does the president have power？Are they constantly challenged by Senate? Are citizens free to make their own decisions? For example when they go to the ballot box is there pressure to vote a certain way? So I think we can see from this, that our answer to the question depends on the concept of democracy that we develop ourselves. There is not particularly right or wrong answer on that conception of what democracy is.

So the lesson from this video here today is that, it’s okay to ask the interviewer for clarifications. It’s okay to ask them questions to try and help you give your own answer. And it’s okay to make assumptions when giving our answer, so long as they were explained. So for instance, we sort of might feel that democracy involved free speech, where we’re claiming that to be part of our conception of democracy. It’s ok to do these things and challenge the interviewer for more information, so
long as you’re giving justifications 

So hope that gives you an idea of what politics into these might be like.