Q-Step Essay

Sun May 06 2018

In Hilary Term 2018, we were asked to read Lijphart, learn R, and write an empirical politics essay critiquing Lijphart. The essay is

expected to provide an empirical answer to one of the three questions listed below that deal with Lijphart’s regime type classification and its consequences:

Does consensus democracy reduce social inequality?

Does consensus democracy improve economic outcomes?

Does consensus democracy improve the quality of government?

I chose the first question, "Does consensus democracy reduce social inequality?" I used an R notebook to do my scratch work and preliminary data exploration, then wrote the essay in Markdown and used pandoc to compile it.

I was pleased that this essay won the 2018 prize. Professors David Kirk and Andrew Eggers were the markers. Andy later became my thesis advisor.

The GitHub repo is available at https://github.com/lieuzhenghong/qstep-essay and the essay can be found here