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.
State capacity concerns the ability of the state to make and implement its decisions. State capacity became more central in social science debates due to recent increases in the incidence of societal conflicts and phenomena relating to state failure and weakness. The concept is also central in the …
State capitalism is a term applied to national political economies in the postwar period that were characterized by a strongly interventionist state. France until the early 1980s was the ideal-typical model of state capitalism. The developmental state as found in Korea and Taiwan is another variant of state …
A state church is a religious organization that receives official endorsement or significant financial subsidization from a government within a society. Official endorsement implies a legal statement to the effect that a specific denomination is the preferred faith of a government to the exclusion or significant limitation of …
One of the major questions in the research on international institutions, as stated by Robert Keohane (1984), has been “why governments, seeking to promote their own interests, ever comply with the rules of international regimes when they view these rules as in conflict with . . . their …
Simply put, statecraft is the art of conducting state affairs, which may be either domestic or foreign. Statecraft is generally defined in two ways. The first definition views statecraft as the science of government that focuses on the institutions and instruments of power. The second is that it …
Since the end of the cold war, scholars and policy makers have become increasingly concerned about state failure. The focus began in the U.S. policy community in the 1990s when the primary concern was forecasting changes of government and humanitarian crises. After al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks in the United …
Inheritor of the ancient Greek concept of politeia (polity), the state in Europe emerged gradually, to varying degrees and in response to various dynamics, from around the twelfth century until the end of the eighteenth century. More concretely, the period of 1485 to 1789 saw the building of …
Inheritor of the ancient Greek concept of politeia (polity), the state in Europe emerged gradually, to varying degrees and in response to various dynamics, from around the twelfth century until the end of the eighteenth century. More concretely, the period of 1485 to 1789 saw the building of …
A definition of a stateless nation included several elements, such as a sharing by the inhabitants of a self-perceived common culture and history, an attachment to a particular territory within a larger state, and a desire for home rule and eventual independence, as noted by Montserrat Guibernau (1999). …
The state of nature is a condition without government, generally used in social contract theory to justify political authority. The device assumed greatest importance in the works of the great contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it has a long history, both before and after …
Article II, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” President George Washington delivered, in person …
State repression represents the use of coercive power upon social groups and individuals by state institutions in a given territory. More specifically, it denotes policies of modern states and regimes to forcefully integrate, assimilate, or eliminate ethnically, religiously, or ideologically distinct groups engaged in resisting or contesting existing …
States vary in size, from Russia’s seventeen million square kilometers (27.4 million square miles) and China’s 1.3 billion people to Nauru’s twenty-one square kilometers (thirteen square miles) and ten thousand people. The puzzles of why there is so much variation and whether there is a generalizable explanation for …
The American political doctrine of states’ rights has its roots in the struggles of the American colonies with the British Crown and its agents. Rallying to the cry “no taxation without representation,” the colonies assembled at the Second Continental Congress virtually as an assembly of ambassadors from the …
Statistical analysis is concerned with ways of analyzing quantitative data using statistical methods. Data used in statistical analysis may come from a variety of sources, such as standardized surveys, content analysis of the media, standardized observation, experiments and quasi-experiments, censuses, official statistics, or election results. The two major …
Donald E. Stokes (1927–1997) was an American political scientist who was a specialist in public opinion research. He was known for his studies of voting behavior in the United States and Great Britain. Stokes was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in …
As presented in the original 1941 article by Walter Stolper and Paul Samuelson, the theorem postulates that the imposition of an import tariff by a small nation leads to an increase in the real income of the scarce production factor of that nation and to a reduction in …
Strategic interest is, by definition, a highly contextual notion reflecting the preferences of the actors involved in politics or in policy. Simply put, a strategic interest implies the preference or a set of preferences that are considered crucial by a specific actor. An actor’s interests will define its …
Strategic voting (also referred to as tactical voting) describes the decision-making process of individuals who fail to express their true preferences at the ballot box in order to prevent their least preferred candidate from winning an election. It assumes that individuals maintain a level of knowledge about others’ …
Strategy is the art of utilizing military power or its threat to achieve political objectives. War can be analyzed at four different levels. At the political level, sometimes called grand strategy, a state’s political goals—which ultimately aims at guaranteeing its survival—are defined as well as the means—which extend …
