Lotte Hargrave

Biography:

Lotte Hargrave is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University College London (UCL), supervised by Prof. Meg Russell, Dr. Jack Blumenau, and Prof. Jennifer Hudson.

In the Department, Lotte is an active member of the Comparative Politics/Political Economy/Political Behaviour and the Constitution Unit research clusters. For the past two years, she has co-organised the Departmental Research Seminar, the flagship seminar series of the Department. In the seminar, external speakers are invited from around the world to present and workshop their research with the faculty and research students. The sessions cover all the subfields of the discipline and different methodological approaches, creating a forum that brings together researchers with diverse interests.

In addition to this, for the past two years, Lotte has been the Doctoral Students Representative in the Department. In this role, she represents PhD students, communicates their concerns to the faculty, and is involved in co-organising a range of networking events, panels, and workshops to help diversify the skillset of doctoral students in the Department. This has included informal "coffee roulette" networking between departmental faculty and doctoral students, panels on academic and non-academic careers, and workshops on communication skills.

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

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PhD title and abstract

“Gender, Stereotypes, and Political Style: Politicians’ Behaviour and Voters’ Evaluation”

Lotte’s doctoral research focuses on two main themes. The first theme focuses on the behaviour of political elites in the British context. In this research, she seeks to identify how widely held gender stereotypes create incentives for the ways in which MPs debate in the UK House of Commons and how these pressures shift by context and over time. She focuses on both the issue content that politicians prioritise when they participate in parliamentary debate, but also the style in which politicians deliver their arguments. To address these questions, she works with parliamentary speech data and utilises innovative quantitative text analysis tools. The second theme focuses on the behaviour of British voters. In this research, she seeks to identify whether gender bias informs the judgements voters make when they perceive and evaluate the arguments of politicians. To address these questions, she utilises survey experimental methods. You can learn more about her research here.

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Research Interests:

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

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Research Groups

• Comparative politics
• Data analysis
• Constitution Unit

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List of Publications:

• "The Gendered Debate: Do Men and Women Communicate Differently in the House of Commons?", with Tone Langengen. Politics & Gender (Forthcoming, 2020)
• "Marion Fellows" Chapter in The Honourable Ladies: Volume II Profiles of Women MPs 1997–2019. (eds. Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith, 2019)

Works in progress

• "The Declining Importance of Gender Stereotypes for Politicians’ Style in the UK", with Jack Blumenau. Revise and resubmit, British Journal of Political Science (2021)
• "Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit: Deliberation in a Polarised Setting", with Alan Renwick, Rebecca McKee, and Graham Smith. Working paper (2021)

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Teaching Summary:

• 2020/21: POLS0083 Quantitative Data Analysis, UCL. Teaching Assistant – Seminars.
• 2019/20: POLS002 Democracy & Authoritarianism, UCL. Teaching Assistant – Seminars.
• 2018/19: Content Analysis with NVivo Postgraduate Workshops, UCL. Instructor.