FIRST YEAR EXAM REVIEW

Question 3 again went very well for most of you. Some still struggle with getting the structure right for this kind of question, something you should practice further. Things to work on to score full marks here were:

• replying to both command terms: the question asked you to compare and contrast, so questions that showed only differences could not earn full marks.
• pairing up quotes and details to make a running comparison, rather than going about it source-by-source. As you can see from the examples, there are different ways in which the same quotes can be combined. This is fine, so long as you can find overarching themes to connect them. Have a look at the examples below :

Section 2:

The most popular question this year was question 3 on sovereignty, followed by question 1 on legitimacy and lastly 2 on media power. All questions achieved roughly equal average results, which is a good sign.

Question 1: Evaluate the ways in which different governments claim to be legitimate.

Responses to question 1 were most successful when students really got to grips with the concept of legitimacy and used scholars such as Weber and Beetham to provide a framework for them to evaluate how different governments claim their legitimacy. Many of you did a good job at discussing how different actions can be presented as legitimate or illegitimate depending on the observer's perspective. To push into the top mark band, more evaluation of the strengths/weaknesses of these different perspectives was needed. Below are the two top answers with my comments:

Question 2: To what extent is media influence the most important source of power in global politics?

Responses to question 2 were most successful when students really approached the question head-on and focused on the expression "most important". Relating this question to the realism-liberalism debate also made for very good responses. Many of you did a good job at discussing different types and theories of power and evaluating the potential benefits and risks of media power. However, you then wrote past the question a little bit by not really answering whether it is the most important, i.e. more important than other sources of power such as money or military. The main take-away point from this is that you really need to be clear about what exactly the question is asking you to do. Below is the top answer with my comments:

Question 3: Referring to at least two cases you have studied, examine the reasons why some states are better able to exercise their sovereignty than other states.

Responses to question 3 were most successful when students picked apart the concept of sovereignty into its different aspects, such as external and internal, or de jure and de facto sovereignty. You discussed a variety of reasons why some states are better able to exercise their sovereignty than others, including historical factors, economic and military might, hegemony in international organisations, and many more. Some of you did not quite go deep enough in your analysis - e.g. you responded by stating that strong states are more sovereign than weak ones, but then did not really analyse why some states are stronger than others in the first place. A deeper analysis of any combination of the previously mentioned factors would have boosted your score here. Some answers did a particularly good job at relating this question to post-colonial theory, as you can see in Sample A. Below are the two top answers with my comments: