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.
A decade ago, the term transnational movements would have seemed an oxymoron because the social movement was considered the quintessential accompaniment to the development of the national state. The rise of movements coincided with the rise of the national state; they grew up under institutional umbrellas such as …
Transnational voting is the extension of traditional territorial enfranchisement, or suffrage, beyond national borders. It is typically considered an adaptation of the traditional voting system to global circumstances characterized by overlapping sociopolitical interactions. The life of individuals is, for the most part, limited to domestic sociopolitical interaction. As …
Transparency in the field of government is the ability of constituents to gain access to the facts, figures, documents, decisions, and other aspects of their government. Its meaning in this political context is, then, a derivative of its meaning in more common parlance—to see through an object. However, …
Trial courts are legal forums where disputes between litigants, known as cases, are subject to a resolution by judge and jury through the process of a trial. With only a few exceptions, all cases are heard first in a trial court. Trial procedures vary substantially according to the …
Leon (Lev) Trotsky (1879–1940) was a major Russian Marxist figure and key actor in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that brought communism to Russia. Although sometimes described as Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s most capable lieutenant, Trotsky found himself politically isolated after Lenin’s death in 1924, was forced to …
The issue of trust gained greater attention with the culturalist turn of sociology, when soft variables and intangibles began to receive more attention. Central for social interaction, trust reduces complexity and therefore facilitates human capacity to act. Trust is relational in nature—at least one participant in a trust …
The trusteeship system was a direct continuation of the previously mandated system, developed under the authority of the League of Nations. Under this system, the formerly mandated countries continued to assist the mandated territories in building their capacity to support statehood and sovereignty. The Charter of United Nations …
The term voter turnout is often used in inconsistent ways to describe and account for the act, the qualities, the causes, and the significance of voter participation in democratic elections. Nineteenth-century journalistic accounts employed the term to recognize the presence of voters on election day or to describe …
In modern society, a tyranny is often defined as a political system in which one or a few persons hold power, opposed to a democracy, where many share power. The two most common representations of modern tyranny are Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union. Historically, tyranny has …
In his On Liberty, John Stuart Mill separates concerns about the tyranny of the majority into two distinct challenges for democracy. The first of these can be considered an institutional problem. According to Mill, even in a system of majority rule, governance might still reflect the abuses associated …
U.S. political thought encompasses different moral-political traditions largely organized around three different theories of politics: liberalism, republicanism, and ascription. Liberalism is a theory of the individual and the individual’s right to private property and liberty, with liberty defined as an equal right to be free from the harm …
In the early twentieth century, African American social movements emerged in response to the nineteenth-century conditions—de jure segregation, disfranchisement, lynching, and widespread poverty—in black communities in the North and South. In the late nineteenth century, African American journalist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett both nationalized and internationalized the ant lynching …
For quite some time, the discussion of Latinos in the United States has focused primarily on their rapid population growth and recent residential location in nontraditional areas of the country. Now over 45 million strong, Latinos constitute more than 15 percent of the total U.S. population, and the …
One of the most prominent civil rights movements of the last four decades has been the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement, in part due to the influence of other successful civil rights movements and in part as a response to the political environment that explicitly marginalized gays …
Interest groups representing racial and ethnic minorities are central to civil rights politics. Minority interest groups have mainly pursued a strategy of sponsor ing litigation because the federal courts are insulated from electoral politics. Despite the prominence of the litigation strategy, evidence suggests that litigation is not necessarily …
Women comprise more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, but their political integration as voters, activists, and elected officials is a relatively new phenomenon. Not until 1920 did the Nineteenth Amendment extend voting rights to women, and not until 2008 did a woman—Hillary Clinton—win a presidential primary. …
In Arabic, ummah means community. In modern usage, ummah sometimes serves as the equivalent of the English word nation. But in Islamic religiopolitical thought (in which case it tends not to be translated) ummah refers to the worldwide body of Muslims, and according to Islamic doctrine, this body …
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936) was a Basque academic, writer, and philosopher. Even though both his political and philosophical views were subject to radical changes during his lifetime, he is considered a key representative both of European existentialist philosophy and the Spanish cultural and literary movement known …
While legislatures are the most democratic of the institutions of governance, the second chambers of bicameral legislatures are typically less democratic, and thus have been supplanted by the main and newer chambers. Distribution Historically, some parliaments have been multicameral. Sweden, until 1866, had four chambers, while South Africa …
The great majority of countries in the world utilize a unitary form of government, in which the central government, by constitutional arrangement, is the exclusive sovereign power: it has the legal authority to create, reorganize, or eliminate subordinate levels of government. In countries that use a unitary structure—for …
