A level Government & Politics

Hi, I am currently in the second year of my Politics A Level and personally absolutely love it and am planning to carry on doing politics at uni! I don’t do Psychology but for Politics, all the exam questions are essays which can be pretty tough if you haven’t got good exam technique or don’t enjoy essay writing! I think Politics is really important especially at the moment, and teaches you bits about economics, history and sociology as well, so it’s quite a range of stuff you learn! Pretty intense course, lots of content to fit into the two years so you do have to do lots of extra work . Hope this helps!!

Yeah it does help a lot thank you! What are some of the topics you do ? because i’ve heard the course is more about how to vote and stuff and not the factors and stuff that influence voting outcomes.

So, in the first year you so U.K. Politics, all about like the political parties, democracy, voting behaviours etc. which I found soooo interesting! Voting behaviours did include the factors that influenced voting outcomes so you look in-depth into some important elections/referendums and see why certain groups voted the way they did. Then in second year, you look at core ideologies (conservatism, liberalism and socialism) which helps you understand where the political parties’ ideas originate from! Finally, your teacher will choose to either teach you US Politics (basically the same topics as U.K. Politics only for America), or Global Politics, where you learn about how states cooperate. I have just finished Global Politics and to be honest wish we’d done US Politics, as this year hasn’t been as interesting for me personally as last year!

Our school does US Politics - which i am very interested in. Thanks so much for that ! it has really helped.

I’m nearly finished learning the content, Politics is defo intense! A lot of time has to be sent! I think the hardest is the ideology question - socialism, liberalism, anarchism and conservatism. US politics you’ll learn is very tight, what I mean by this is that no branch of government has too much power. So the president is limited by congress and Supreme Court. For example the president can declare war but funding comes from congress, so it prevents the president from having too much power. Rather it encouraged bipartisanship, where parties compromise and work together. This is because the founding fathers did not want tyranny, so introduced checks and separation of powers.

Feel free to answer questions - I study both subjects

Which one would u say you preferred out of psychology and politics because the forensic psychology aspect really interests me but i feel like it might just be my novice vantage point assuming we’ll learn about serial killers every lesson as opposed to mundane stuff