Bedales Politics Prize winners 2026

"The biggest problem facing the world today is..."

The winners of this year's Politics Prize have been announced! Congratulations to Florence in Block 4 (Year 10) for winning the Junior Politics Prize with her essay on the 'credibility of information' and to Harry in 6.1 (Year 12) for his essay on 'political polarisation'.

This is the fourth year that the Politics Prize has run, generously supported by current parent Donald, with this year's seeing students submitting essays in response to the statement: "The biggest problem facing the world today is..."

There were 25 entries in total and previous Politics Prizes have included speaking competitions and a mock general election campaign in 2024.

Nick Gregory, Teacher of History & Politics commented:

“We were blown away by the quality and originality of the essays submitted for this year’s Bedales Politics Prize. The level of research and detail that went into them was superb, and a real reminder of what makes Bedales students special. Alongside the topics we anticipated, there were some fascinating essays that shone a spotlight on lesser-discussed problems facing the world today. These essays showcased the very best of the deep-thinking and global awareness that makes Bedalians unique. Whilst the question posed to the students might not sound the most uplifting, it was a real joy to read their submissions and impossible not to feel energised by the innovative solutions they came up with. Choosing just one winner in each category was an almost impossible task, such was the level across the board, but we felt that Florence in the junior category and Harry in the senior category were incredibly worthy winners!”

Read this year's winning entries below.

Senior Politics Prize winning entry: Harry, 6.1 (Year 12)

There are numerous existential problems facing our world today, and we have answers for many of them, but what we are lacking is the political capacity to act on these issues, and that capacity is being eroded by political polarisation, faster than any tangible crisis can be solved. This polarisation is not the disagreement of opposing views, but an identity-based form of division in which those with differing views are seen not as rivals, but as enemies.

Political polarisation is the root cause for many of the superficial issues that we face today, for instance; loneliness. The dissociation of people and their social ties (Putnam, 2000) tracked in declining club membership, church attendance, and neighbourhood contact) directly leads to an increase in political activity, this sense of belonging to what researchers call a political ‘mega-identity’ (Mason, 2018) – this identity provides the habitat for polarisation to grow with like-minded people and it fills the gap that we miss, a tribe-like feeling that we would get from community life. Furthermore, a 2025 study done by New Zealander researchers (Authors, 2025) show that affective polarisation was directly linked with lower social support, high stress, and worse health, this shows that political polarisation can be directly correlated to the Loneliness Pandemic, the cycle between loneliness and political polarisation is ever growing. Isolation itself pushes people towards tribal political identity to find the lacking sense of belonging, and the resulting animosity towards the “other side” removes the foundations for friendships and social support that may have originally protected against loneliness.

Another issue that can be seen in the modern world is the erosion of trust in institutions and how this can be shown to be linked to polarisation. When neutral institutions (national broadcasters, mainstream press, electoral bodies) decline in the level of trust, people don’t stop looking for information, but rather they redirect their trust towards partisan-aligned sources. This increase of consumption of partisan media is a consistently cited driver of affective polarisation. It is the same with the reverse loop: once people are polarized, where they entrust is partisan rather than universal; the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report (Reuters, 2026), which covers 48 countries, has found that trust in news has fallen to a record low globally. Also, the data found that people on the political right or left have large differences on how they view their news, meaning that the same broadcaster is “trustworthy” or “biased” purely based on who is asking. Trust doesn’t just erode, it fractures along political lines, which therefore deepens that divide since each side has no shared referee.

The relationship between science and politics is the clearest proof of polarisation's damage. Climate change has become a political identity marker – meaning people no longer evaluate evidence neutrally, but through the lens of tribal loyalty. 82% of US Democrats believe human activity significantly contributes to climate change, compared to just 38% of Republicans, (Cary Funk, 2016 - 2024) a gap that tracks party affiliation far more than access to information. Furthermore, the reverse mechanism is also key, once someone commits to a politicised opinion, they struggle to imagine that an opponent might be working from different facts, and instead conclude that the opponent is dishonest or malicious. This is a defining feature of affective polarisation, meaning the politicisation of science doesn't merely reflect division, it creates more of it (Rekker, 2025). However, political polarisation does not melt glaciers… Why has the climate crisis still not been fixed? Because the sustained political action that is required across electoral cycles is exactly what polarisation destroys, we already have the technology to solve the climate crisis, international frameworks like the Paris Agreement have mapped the path, and the science is unmistakeable. Research confirms that higher polarisation leads

directly to greater treaty non-compliance, (Perrings, 2021) making international agreements nearly impossible to sustain, whilst populist distrust in institutions further compromises climate investment (Pihkala, 2025). Climate change is one of the most pressing issues we face today – but what we need is direct political action, and political polarisation is actively working to dismantle the frameworks designed to solve climate change.

An equally distressing issue facing our society is the rollback of women's rights and rising ethno-nationalism – direct, targeted harm and an explicit attack on human dignity. When measurable progress on gender equality existed, it was precisely because it operated as a policy debate with room for persuasion. What changed was never the moral argument but the emergence of social media as a machine for converting that debate into polarised, tribal warfare. A 2024 study published in Science (Chenyan, 2025) proved that social media algorithms systematically amplify politically aggressive and emotionally volatile content, directly creating affective polarisation. Platforms are architecturally designed to deepen division because outrage generates engagement, and that outrage gets directed. Communities known as the "manosphere" channel this algorithmically-produced anger into increasingly extreme anti-feminism, what researchers call "algorithmic radicalisation" (T Abbas) : moderate cultural anxiety, turned into hardened identity. These positions then re-enter mainstream political discourse as apparently organic opinion, giving a sense of legitimacy to movements that were engineered, not grown. Anti-feminism was not built on philosophy, instead it was manufactured by an algorithm. Tackle it in isolation and the machine simply produces more. The only solution is dismantling polarisation itself.

Whilst each and every nation faces their own challenges, and the world facing its own challenges, the underlying rot of political polarisation repeats itself through very different political institutions, time and time again. This suggests a structural, not coincidental pattern, the very human ability to act collectively to solve issues is being decayed by political polarisation, it has become the destructive element that has woven itself into almost every existential issue that the world is now facing. Polarisation, whilst it may not kill alone, or drive extinction of wildlife, prevents any worthwhile action from being taken, therefore the problem of political polarisation deserves priority in fixing not above other problems in severity, but ahead of them in sequence.

Works cited

Authors, T. (2025, December). National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from Political Polarization and Wellbeing: Investigating Potential Intrapersonal Harm From Affective Polarization: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12679990/

Cary Funk, B. K. (2016 - 2024). Pew Research Center. Retrieved from The Politics of Climate Change in the United States: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climate/

Chenyan, J. (2025). Social Media Algorithms. Mason, L. (2018). Unicivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity . University of Chicago Press.

Perrings, C. (2021). ASU News.

Pihkala. (2025). Climate Action. Nature Publishing Group.

Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone. SImon & Schister.

Rekker, R. (2025, January). A four-level model of political polarization over science: Evidence from 10 European countries. Retrieved from National Library of Medicine: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12038069/

Reuters. (2026, June). Reuters 2026 Digital News Report. Retrieved from Attitudes towards News: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/interactive#/?section=q6_2016_1

T Abbas, R. M.-W. (n.d.). Digital Masulinites in Crisis. Men and Masculinites.

Junior Politics Prize winning entry: Florence, Block 4 (Year 10)

Of all the many abundances in our modern society, there exists something that has never been in higher quantity in all human history. Information: the basis of opinion, and more widely available to everybody across the globe than ever before thanks to the internet and widespread access to technology. Yet despite this, we have never been more uncertain as to the quality and credibility of our sources.

In around 1440 AD, the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg, facilitating for the first time a worldwide spread of ideas. Today, we face a decline in credible information so severe that worldwide trust in news is at 37%, according to the Reuters Institute in a study published just last week. This is an all-time low since it first began recording in 2015.

The ability for anybody to voice their opinions is remarkable yet comes with many drawbacks - as Michael Campi wrote on Substack, those who label themselves as “experts” tend to be the “people (who) seem to be the least informed about their subject matter”.

Anybody, with the right motive, can feed an audience sensationalised information, often wrapped in truths to add validity to a lie. And when extremism begins to feel justifiable because of how widespread it is, the polarisation of opinions can cause worldwide breakdown. World War II, for example, was the deadliest conflict in human history with 60-80 million deaths and affected every country in the world – it began with Hitler, who was able to radicalise his people through newspaper, radio and poster propaganda. If he were alive today, what kind of effect could that have with the added online influence?

Which poses another problem entirely – the complete lack of role models for my generation. What kind of figure in a position of leadership can be aspirational surrounded by endless scrutinization over their decisions and personal opinions? And where does this leave everybody else, with no trust in their leaders and unsure what to believe?

The quantity of information also plays on cognitive biases – confirmation bias (only excepting what confirms prior opinion) and availability bias (forming opinion based on the most commonly available information), both of which algorithms encourage. The effect of these are evidenced by the widespread increase in far-right/left wing party popularity - Switzerland, Portugal and Poland all have governments like these in place currently, with many more around the globe that function with similar policies (but do not acknowledge their political position in the same way).

A possible solution could be more independently funded, peer-reviewed information, publicised and freely available. However, what is really necessary and what fewest people are willing to do is start a cultural shift away from reliance on online material,

which, with studies showing people are online less for connectivity and more for reels and viral posts, is seemingly more unlikely than ever.

To conclude, as American novelist Tom Clancy put it, “Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people”.

Today, anybody can control information.