The 24-Mark Political Ideas Essay

Section B of Papers 1 and 2 carries 24 marks and one question, chosen from two. On Paper 1 it covers the core ideas — conservatism, liberalism and socialism — and may draw on one core idea or two. On Paper 2 it covers the non-core idea studied on your route; on this route that is nationalism.

The command word is To what extent, defined by Pearson as reviewing political ideas in order to make substantiated judgements and draw conclusions. The marks divide AO1 8, AO2 8, AO3 8.

The levels are narrower than on a 30-mark essay, so a band is crossed more easily:

Level	Mark range
1	1–4
2	5–9
3	10–14
4	15–19
5	20–24

Two features of the specification shape what a question can ask. Questions focus on content areas 1 and 2 of the idea — its core principles, and the tensions between its strands — and they require you to use the key ideas of the thinkers in content area 3 to support the argument. Biographical detail about the thinkers is out of scope.

Typical stems look like this:

• To what extent do modern and classical liberals agree over the role of the state?
• To what extent is socialism united in its view of human nature?
• To what extent is nationalism progressive?

Each names a theme — the state, human nature, progress — and asks how far the ideology holds together on it.

Section B has two ceilings written into the published mark scheme, and both are avoidable. The thinkers requirement is spelled out in Pearson's Synopticity, comparisons and links guidance, which sets it out idea by idea.

Rule one: at least two named thinkers from that idea's list. The mark schemes for Papers 1 and 2 (June 2025 series) state that "candidates who do not refer to specific thinkers from the specification and/or only consider one side cannot achieve beyond Level 2" — a maximum of 9 marks out of 24. Pearson's Synopticity, comparisons and links guidance supplies the number, requiring "at least two of" the thinkers listed for the idea in question. The lists are fixed:

Idea	Specification thinkers
Conservatism	Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick
Liberalism	John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Betty Friedan
Socialism	Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Beatrice Webb, Rosa Luxemburg, Anthony Crosland, Anthony Giddens
Nationalism (Paper 2)	Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Maurras, Marcus Garvey

Marx and Engels count as a single paired entry in the specification, so an answer citing them alone has one thinker, not two.

Rule two: both sides. An answer that argues only for agreement, or only for disagreement, is capped in the same band. The question sets up a contest, and both parties have to appear.

Two thinkers is a floor, not a target. Both rules are cleared in the first two paragraphs of a competently planned answer, and the marks above Level 2 are won on how well the thinkers are used.

Examiner feedback on the 2025 series identified superficial name-dropping as a distinct weakness: thinkers mentioned without being linked to the argument, or applied inaccurately. A named thinker attached to a claim they did not make is worse than no thinker at all, because it damages AO1 as well.

A common structural error is to write a paragraph per thinker. Examiners marking summer 2025 listed led by strands, not thinkers among the features of stronger answers, and outlining each strand in turn without comparison — described in the report as the storytelling approach — among the weaker ones.

The two failure modes are opposite and both cost AO2:

Failure	What it looks like	What it loses
Thinker-driven	A paragraph on Hobbes, then one on Burke, then one on Nozick	The strands disappear, and the question was about strands
Strand-by-strand narrative	A paragraph describing traditional conservatism, then one describing the New Right	No comparison, so AO2 has nothing to credit

The structure that satisfies both is the themed paragraph: pick an aspect of the question and compare two or three strands on it inside the same section, using thinkers as evidence.

A plan for To what extent are conservatives united in their attitude towards the state? might run:

1. Agreement — the state exists because humans are imperfect. Traditional, one-nation and New Right conservatives all start from human imperfection (Hobbes on human vulnerability; Oakeshott on unpredictability).
2. Disagreement — how much the state should do. One-nation paternalism against New Right neo-liberalism (Nozick on self-ownership against the one-nation obligation of the wealthy to the poor).
3. Disagreement — how the state should change. Burke's organic, cautious change against the New Right's willingness to roll back the state radically.
4. Judgement. The agreement is about why a state is needed; the disagreements are about what it should do, which is the more consequential question.

Every paragraph in that plan compares. None of them is a biography.

The extract below answers To what extent do modern and classical liberals agree over the role of the state? The line of argument is that the disagreement outweighs the agreement.

Both strands begin from the same premise, and the agreement is real rather than nominal. Liberals of every kind hold that a state is necessary because individuals cannot secure their own freedom in its absence, and that its authority must rest on consent. Locke's social contract makes the state a voluntary creation with limited and revocable powers, and Mill's harm principle sets the boundary of legitimate interference at the point where one person's action damages another. Modern liberals do not repudiate either idea; Rawls builds his theory of justice on the same requirement that a society be one which rational people would consent to from behind the veil of ignorance. The shared commitment, then, is that the state is a servant of individual freedom and derives its authority from below. Yet this agreement is narrower than it first appears, because it settles only the question of why a state is legitimate, not what it should do. On the second question the strands divide sharply. Classical liberals draw from the same premise a minimal state confined to defence, order and contract enforcement, coupled with a free-market economy, on the reasoning that every expansion of state action subtracts from the space in which individuals act freely. Modern liberals invert the reasoning: Rawls's enabling state uses redistribution and welfare to give formal freedoms practical content, because a right to seek work means little to someone without education or health. This is not a difference of degree along a shared scale, it is a disagreement about whether state action creates freedom or consumes it — and since the whole practical question of what government should do turns on that disagreement, it must count for more than the agreement about origins.

Notice the shape. Agreement is established first, with two thinkers. The turn is signalled explicitly. The disagreement is then compared directly rather than described in turn. The judgement is stated at the end of the section, and it gives a reason — the disagreement decides more of what is at stake.

On Paper 2, the same technique applies to a very different idea. The question is To what extent is nationalism progressive?

The progressive claim rests on the strand of nationalism that grew directly out of liberal thought. Liberal nationalism treats the nation as a community entitled to govern itself and imagines a world of autonomous nation-states coexisting on equal terms — Mazzini's argument that human beings can express themselves only through their nation, and that freedom depends on creating one's own nation-state, makes national self-determination a form of individual liberation rather than a rival to it. Anti-colonial nationalism carries the same logic further: Garvey's pan-Africanism took national identity as the vehicle for the empowerment of a dispersed people and set self-determination against colonial rule. On this evidence nationalism is a liberating doctrine. The difficulty is that the same principle produces the opposite politics in other strands, and the transformation is not accidental. Expansionist nationalism rejects the right of all nations to self-determination while claiming it for one, and Maurras's integral nationalism asks the individual to dissolve into the nation and cultivates a militaristic ethos — the inverse of the liberal premise that the nation exists to serve its members. Conservative nationalism sits between the two, using national feeling to bind an existing society together rather than to create a new state. The decisive point is that liberal and expansionist nationalists share the same starting material, the nation as the natural political unit, and diverge on whether that entitlement is universal or exclusive. Because the same core idea supports both emancipation and domination, nationalism is better described as available to progressive politics than as progressive in itself.

Both worked paragraphs share four features: a theme rather than a person as the organising unit, at least two thinkers used for their ideas, explicit comparison, and an interim judgement that gives its reasons.

Judging extent. The command word changes what AO3 has to deliver. On a 30-mark Evaluate essay the judgement is whether a claim is true. On a 24-mark To what extent question the judgement is comparative: are the similarities more significant than the differences, or the other way round? Examiner feedback in 2025 recorded candidates misreading the stem as a yes-or-no question and so producing no assessment of extent at all.

Three ways to make the extent judgement concrete:

• Weigh by consequence. A disagreement that changes what a government would actually do outranks an agreement about first principles.
• Weigh by reconcilability. Differences the strands could live with matter less than ones that are mutually exclusive.
• Weigh by scope. A division running through every strand counts for more than one separating a single strand from the rest.

Structure. An ideas answer needs an opening and a close, because that is where the overall judgement is stated and confirmed. Between them, three or four themed sections is realistic in the time available.

Time. Papers 1 and 2 allow 2 hours for 84 marks, and the question paper advises using the marks in brackets as a guide to how long to spend. That gives the 24-mark question roughly 34 minutes against 43 for each of the two 30-mark questions. Section B is the shortest task on the paper, and it is usually the last one attempted, so the risk is that it absorbs whatever time is left rather than the time it is worth.

For reference, in summer 2025 the average mark on the Paper 1 socialism question about human nature was 10.81 out of 24, and on the liberalism question about democracy 8.95. Both sit inside Level 3 or below. Section B is where the marks are most available, and the two caps are the cheapest part of it to secure.

1. Answering on the wrong theme

The 2025 report describes candidates inserting references to human nature into a pre-prepared essay about the state. The theme in the question is the whole question; a good essay on a different theme scores as an off-target one.

2. Naming thinkers without using them

A thinker earns marks when their key idea does work in the argument. Listing names satisfies the letter of the cap while leaving AO1 and AO2 unearned.

3. Attributing the wrong idea to a thinker

Misapplied thinkers were specifically flagged in 2025. Learn two key ideas per thinker, exactly as the specification frames them, rather than a general impression of their outlook.

4. Over-simplifying the strands

Claims such as classical liberals opposing democracy outright, or Third Way socialists being purely individualist, were criticised as over-generalisation. The strands overlap, and saying where they overlap is itself analysis.

5. Writing biography

The specification states that content area 3 focuses on the key ideas rather than the study of biographical information. Dates of birth and life stories earn nothing.

6. Treating the extent question as a yes or no

The judgement required is whether agreement or disagreement is the more significant. An answer proving that a difference exists has answered a question that was not asked.

7. Leaving the judgement to the final paragraph

AO3 is 8 of the 24 marks. Close each themed section with a verdict on that theme, so the final paragraph confirms a case rather than making one.