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.
Political philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836) was born in Cambridge shire, England, to middle-class parents. His father was a Nonconformist minister, a profession for which Godwin was initially educated. His life was at times turbulent; he was declared bankrupt in 1825 and was scorned and satirized by for me …
Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist, socialist activist, speaker, and writer born in Lithuania (then part of the Russian empire) and active in the United States, Soviet Union, and several Western European countries. Goldman worked in the garment industry in St. Petersburg and, after emigrating in 1885, in …
The concept of governance is as old as human civilization. In their 2002 article, “Comparing Governance across Countries and Over Time,” Goran Hoyden and Julius Court note that there are those who view governance, on the one hand, “as concerned with the rules of conducting public affairs, and …
Frank Johnson Goodnow (1859–1939) was an American professor of administrative law and political science, a university president, and a progressive social reform advocate. Cofounder and first elected president of the American Political Science Association, he is considered the “father of public administration.” His prolific scientific work—he authored a …
Harold Foote Gosnell (1896–1997) was an American political scientist and social science methodologist. He is remembered for bringing quantitative methodology into the mainstream of political science, using both experimental and statistical methods. In his 1933 essay, “Statisticians and Political Scientists,” he advocated for the use of statistics in …
Governability can be defined as the capacity of governors to steer the ship of state toward its policy objectives. Policies depend for their success not only on what governments do but also on the responses of others that government can influence but not completely determine. First of all, …
Good governance requires representation and effectiveness. A representative government, if it is not effective at decision making, may generate frustration and conflict among different groups. In turn, administrative effectiveness, if it is not based on fair representation of the society, can be counterproductive, since it may produce arbitrary …
In the United States, each of the fifty states has a governor who serves as the leader of the executive branch. The power and influence of the governor varies from state to state. In general, the governor has the authority to veto legislation, activate the state’s National Guard, …
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian journalist, activist, and theorist who developed an alternative Marxist political analysis. Although the concepts Gramsci contributed were somewhat obscure during his life, they were later viewed by many as the most important developments in Marxist thinking of the twentieth century. As a …
For centuries, scholars have noted the international importance of powerful states. Today scholars differentiate international systems according to the number of great powers. Most scholars agree about how great power should be measured and which states are likely to be great powers in the coming decades. Debate centers …
The Great Society was the general term for U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s package of domestic reforms, which were enacted by a Democratically controlled Congress in the mid-1960s. The Great Society programs were initially proposed in 1964 as part of the president’s efforts to improve racial equality and …
Etymologically, the term democracy stems from demos, “the people” and kratos “rule.” In the long history of democracy, ancient Greek forms were distinctive in providing their member s with direct rule, unconstrained by representatives. There were many Greek democracies, and there were significant differences between them. But in …
Ancient Greek political theory originally centered on the polis, the distinctive Greek city-state. Greece is naturally divided into relatively small, self-contained territories, many of which are islands in the Aegean Sea. Each area formed its own politically independent society, the polis. The polis was generally viewed as a …
Green political parties are formally organized around the principles of Green politics. They were born out of the 1960s protest movements and the 1970s peace movements in response to what some perceived as politics without real participation, a disrespect for other nations’ sovereignty, a single-minded and one-dimensional pursuit …
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a Dutch jurist. He is most famous for having written De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Laws of War and Peace, 1625), a text commonly acknowledged to have ushered in the modern natural rights tradition and the study of international relations. Grotius held legal …
Group cohesion describes the way individuals are bound together in a group and feel mutual attraction. Pressures and constraints, both external and internal, act on the group and its members to maintain the group’s norms and the group as an entity Development Of The Concept Early research in …
Group relations describe the inner dynamics and interactions of people within a group. They are formed and maintained because group membership satisfies a number of human needs. Groups vary in size and character and exist for a common purpose. A group consists of two or more persons who …
Group theory constitutes the intellectual precursor to pluralism and was originated by Arthur F. Bentley in his The Process of Government (1908). The theory was built upon and refined further by David Truman in his The Governmental Process (1951). Thus, group theory and its offspring of pluralism and …
Groupthink, a termed coined by Yale psychologist Irving Janis, refers to a dysfunctional mode of decision making in which members of exceptionally cohesive groups strive for unanimity in opinion to the extent that they prematurely agree on a particular course of action and fail to consider more suitable …
Guest workers are people who sell their labor in a country other than their country of citizenship. As the term implies, guest workers are different from immigrants in that guest worker s are in a host country strictly to work and are expected to eventually return to their …