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.
Since its emergence in early modern Europe, the liberal tradition of political thought has spawned three major families of theory. The oldest, going back to the seventeenth century or earlier, comprises a set of ideas about political institutions. A second family, which originated in the eighteenth century and …
Liberation theology is a movement born in the Latin American Roman Catholic Church out of the formation of the Roman Catholic bishops’ conference, the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM) in 1955, which helped the church to develop a new awareness of the problems of injustice and development across Latin …
A modern extension of the classical liberal tradition, libertarianism is the political ideology of voluntarism, a commitment to voluntary action in a social context, the rule of law, and the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas. Most libertarians tend to reject the left-right divisions of conventional politics; …
Li Dazhao (1889–1927), also known as Li Ta-Chao, was the cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party and the mentor of Communist leader Mao Zedong. After studying at Waseda University in Tokyo, Li became an editor of the magazine Hsin sch’ingnien (New Youth). In 1918 he was appointed chief …
Francis (Franz) Lieber (1798–1872) was an immigrant to the United States, yet he conceived, edited, and largely wrote the Encyclopedia Americana (1829) in the early nineteenth century. Born in Berlin, Germany, Lieber fought in the Prussian army during the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) and was wounded at the Battle …
City council members in the United States until the late nineteenth century were elected by a single-member or multimember ward plurality electoral system that facilitated boss and machine control. Reformers were disturbed by control of all council seats by one political party and commenced to advocate alternative electoral …
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States, was born February 12, 1809, on his parents’ farm in Kentucky. In his early twenties, he moved to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a storekeeper, riverboat pilot, postmaster, and surveyor. Lincoln served as a militia captain in …
Due to their simplicity, linear models are easy to understand and interpret, which makes them the basis for most of the statistical analyses used in applied political science and social research. The simplest way to understand them is with a two-variable case. Suppose that Y is a response …
Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006) was an American political sociologist whose work won numerous awards. Lipset was born in New York City and earned his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York in 1943 and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University in 1949. Lipset entered college …
Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), a Flemish humanist, philosopher, and classical scholar, was the founder of neostoicism, a key school of European thought in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Born near Brussels, Belgium, Lipsius was educated at the Jesuit College in Cologne, Germany, and the Catholic University of Leuven …
Lobbying might be defined as an attempt to influence the government decision-making process and to secure certain outcomes via individuals or firms (lobbyists) who act on behalf of a person or a special interest group. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bars Congress from abridging the right …
Lobbying is the practice of trying to influence a government policy by actors outside that particular government. The term arose from the practice of advocates gathering in the lobbies outside the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives so that they could plead their cases to officeholders. While …
The term local may assume different meanings. As clarified by Nancy Ettlinger, it can indicate a neighborhood, town, or metropolitan area in the context of a region or nation; it can refer to a region in the context of a nation; and it can signify a nation or …
Known as the founder of modern liberalism, political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was born in Somerset, England. His greatest contributions were in the fields of political philosophy, as articulated in the initially anonymous work The Two Treatises of Government and in epistemology as presented in Essay Concerning Human …
Logistic regression is a multivariate statistical technique used to study the relationship between a set of exogenous or independent variables on a binary endogenous or dependent variable. Sometimes called a logit regression or a logit model, a logistic regression is a special case of a discrete regression and …
Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943) was an American lawyer and educator. He wrote two major studies of European political institutions: Government and Parties in Continental Europe (1896) and The Government of England (1908). In 1909 he became president of the American Political Science Association and in the same year president …
Legislative studies specialists argue that legislatures, in democratic settings, perform representative, legislative, and oversight functions. Of the three types of representative functions, the first is sociological. A parliament represents society because the social characteristics of parliamentary members resemble those of the population. Second, parliaments represent by being given …
Gyorgy Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary critic and Hungarian Marxist philosopher frequently considered to be one of the founders of Western Marxism. He made major contributions to Marxist thought and was an important figure in the Hungarian Communist Party. Lukács was born in Budapest into a wealthy Jewish …
The term lusophone is closely associated with the Portuguese sphere of influence. It is used to refer to people and states across the world with a cultural background and language significantly influenced by the Portuguese. The spread of Lusophone culture can largely be attr ibuted to the Portuguese …
Lustration derives from the Latin word meaning “purification.” In political and legal literature, this concept usually refers to the means by which countries deal with past experiences such as war and government regimes. For example, after 1989, in post-Soviet eastern Europe, those who aspire to obtain public positions …
