Category: Political Science Essay Examples
See our collection of political science essay examples. These example essays are to help you understanding how to write a political science essay. Political science is not merely an academic discipline, and political scientists do not just study the anatomy of politics. Political science is renewed with every political administration and with every major political event and with every political leader. Influential political leaders construct their own -isms (Fidelism/Castroism, Maoism, Gandhism, Reaganism, and so on) so that the political philosophies and ideologies that undergird the discipline have to be reinvented constantly. Also, see our list of political science essay topics to find the one that interests you.
Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a French social philosopher and political theorist. He was the author of controversial and incendiary works on a range of topics, including the essence of socialism, the decadence of modern society, and the role of violence in politics. The seeming contradictions in Sorel’s life …
The sources of law have changed over time. It is not possible to find one single source or form of law in any society. Various streams of authorities flow into the whole of a particular legal tradition. Which sources of law are predominant depends on the nature of …
The South—sometimes refer red to as the global South— refers to the poorer countries in the international system, which are viewed also as lacking influence over the working of the international system and its institutions and are located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While this is not …
Sovereignty is the supreme political authority. The concept forms the basis for the modern international system, and it provides legitimacy to contemporary nation-states and national governments. At its most basic level, sovereignty is control over people and geographic space. Such control is typically invested in the structures of …
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded after the October 1917 Russian Revolution as the world’s first socialist state. Led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik party, the USSR was supposed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat that would facilitate the construction of communism in …
Spatial autocor relation is the clustering of similar or dissimilar behaviors, processes, and events among neighboring observations and is predicted by many theories in the social sciences. Spatial dependence can produce biased and inconsistent parameter estimates or biased standard errors. In contrast to the serial dependence of time …
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880–1936) was a German philosopher and historian. His most renowned work is the two-volume The Decline of the West (1918–1922) in which he breaks with the Hegelian view of history as a rational process of linear progression. Spengler presented a deterministic theoretical model in …
Spin can be interpreted historically as a form of information management that seeks to manipulate public opinion through the selective presentation of the news or facts or data. The term itself, however, is understood largely as a modern concept related to contemporary forms of media. Spin can be …
Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most influential proponents of rationalism in the seventeenth century. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Jewish family, but he was accused of heresy and expelled from the Jewish community in 1656. Of his three major works, the Theologico-political …
Popularized with the implementation of the Australian ballot after the reforms adopted during the Progressive Era, split ticket voting is now a permanent feature of the American political system. Split ticket voting refers to the process of casting votes for more than one party for the different offices …
The spoils system, also known as patronage, is the practice of rewarding political supporters or voters by appointing them to public office or providing them with government contracts or services. Although the phrase typically refers to such practices in the United States, various forms of the spoils system …
The stages model of the policy process is a widely used, if sometimes controversial, representation of the various steps that lead to a policy outcome, from definition of a policy problem to development of a solution through implementation and evaluation. Peter DeLeon (1999) traces the model back to …
Stalinism refers primarily to the set of policies adopted in the Soviet Union during the leadership of Joseph Stalin (1929–1953). While helping to modernize the country, Stalinism also included political terror and repression, which resulted in millions of deaths and the creation of a totalitarian state. Other communist …
Standing committees are permanent panels with fixed subject matter jurisdictions created by the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Almost all legislative proposals introduced in Congress go to standing committees for consideration and possible processing into bills; most proposals never progress further and thus “die” …
The theory of the fiscal crisis of the state developed in response to a widespread consensus of the 1960s that the capitalist state’s enhanced, downwardly redistributive economic role was likely to continue. Thus writers like Andrew Shonfield (1965) and Harold Wilensky (1975) could envisage the continued growth of …
The way in which the U.S. government is organized (federalism, or federalist system) divides authority between a central government and the fifty state governments. This division provides for great diversity in politics, programs, and policies across the fifty individual states. Federalism, as defined by David Rosenbloom and Robert …
Following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the nation-states of Europe emerged as the primary actors in international politics. However, both the formal and informal rights and powers of states have been in decline since the middle of the twentieth century, concurrent with the rise of nonstate actors, …
A state is a set of institutions and specialized personnel that regulates important aspects of the life of a territorially bounded population and extracts resources from that population through taxation. Its regulations are backed by force if necessary. It is recognized internationally as a state by other similarly …
Theories of the state have focused primarily on the determinants of the formation of state policy secondarily on the consequences of policies and have barely addressed the issue of the implementation of state policy. Although particular theoretical arguments about the state are numerous, most can be grouped into …
Max Weber defined the state as the human community that, within a defined territory (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force for itself. This definition focuses on the function of the state ascribing territory as its only inherent characteristic. On the topics of the use …
