Lotte Hargrave

Biography:

Lotte Hargrave is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University College London (UCL). She is a member of the Comparative Politics/Political Economy/Political Behaviour research cluster within the Department. Lotte also co-organises the Departmental Research Seminar, the flagship seminar series of the UCL Department of Political Science.

 

Prior to starting her doctoral studies, she carried out research for the British Election Study, Parliamentary Candidates UK, and the Constitution Unit. She completed her BA in Politics at the University of Nottingham and MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics at UCL.

 

 

PhD title and abstract

Gender and Political Style

 

Lotte’s doctoral research focuses on the kinds of rhetoric elected representatives use in the UK House of Commons and how voters engage with this rhetoric. The project focuses on three main questions (1) do men and women argue differently about politics? (2) under what conditions do differences in argumentation styles manifest? and (3) how do voters perceive political arguments, and does this differ by gender? To examine these questions, she uses a variety of quantitative methods: innovative quantitative text techniques and survey experiments with voters. She is working under the supervision of Professor Meg Russell, Dr Jack Blumenau and Professor Jennifer Hudson.

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Short Abstract:

A large and diverse literature claims that women and men have fundamentally different communication styles in political debate. On the qualitative side, thick descriptive studies provide an array of potential indicators on which men and women differ; but these studies tend to be focused on small-n examples. On the quantitative side, researchers have focused on a narrow range of indicators and shown some differences. Adopting the case study of the UK Parliament, my doctoral research uses both quantitative (text analysis and experimental methods) and qualitative (elite interviews) methods to investigate three research questions: (i) whether men and women have different political styles, (ii) how these styles differ as a function of compositional and institutional factors, and (iii) what the effect of any differences are on voters and their evaluations of MPs. I am working under the supervision of Prof Meg Russell, Dr Jack Blumenau and Prof Jennifer Hudson.

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Research Interests:

• Political behaviour
• Representation
• Political communication
• Quantitative methods
• Legislative studies
• Gender

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Research Groups

• Comparative politics
• Data Analysis

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List of Publications:

 

Hargrave, Lotte. 2019. “Marion Fellows”. In Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith (eds), The Honourable Ladies: Volume II Profiles of Women MPs 1997–2019. London: Biteback Publishing. Available here.

The Gendered Debate: Do men and women communicate differently in the House of Commons? (with Tone Langengen). Revise & Resubmit.

Gendered Styles in Political Debate (with Jack Blumenau). Working paper.

Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit: Deliberation in a Polarised Setting (with Alan Renwick, Rebecca McKee and Graham Smith). In progress.

 

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Teaching Summary:

Lotte teaches on the undergraduate module POLS0002 Democracy & Authoritarianism, which is an introduction to comparative politics. The course covers political institutions and aspects of civil society, public attitudes and political culture, and how they interact to produce political and policy outcomes. Institutional topics include the nature of states and their development, democracy and dictatorship, and variation in democratic institutions and decision-making processes. The course introduces students to a variety of political systems around the world, including both in-depth attention to one specific country, and larger scale global trends and cross-national comparisons. The module also places emphasis on using qualitative, quantitative, and comparative data to address these themes.