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.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) remains politically salient due to his essays “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” and his energetic defense of “Civil Disobedience.” He also derived significant notoriety from his writings on nature and his relationship with the …
Threat perception in international politics is an enduringly important problem that has been somewhat slighted in recent years, in part because cold war rivalries tended to reduce uncertainty about the source of threat. By the end of the twentieth century, however, changes in the international environment—such as the …
Thucydides, son of Olorus (ca. 460–400 BCE), was a Greek author and historian. In spite of the renown of his History of the Peloponnesian War (1629), relatively little is known about him. The best available information, then, comes from his work in History. Rough evidence of his date …
Spread across an open space of 4,736,120 square feet (440,000 square meters) in Beijing, Tiananmen Square is the world’s largest urban plaza. To its north is the Tiananmen, Gate of Heavenly Peace, which was originally built in the 1420s as the southern gateway to the Imperial City. With …
Ticket splitting results when voters cast their ballots for candidates from different parties during a single election. There are two main forms of ticket splitting. Vertical ticket splitting occurs when a voter chooses candidates from different parties for office at various levels of government. For instance, a voter …
Time-series data are repeated, regularly spaced measurements over time. Time-series analysis is designed to leverage the longitudinal information contained in such data and involves examining questions about the effect of interventions on the data series and relationships among series. A starting point for time-series analysis is the characterization …
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French philosopher trained in law, political philosophy, and history. His Democracy in America, first published in 1835, provided an incisive look into the character of America. Differentiating the American system from European systems, Tocqueville discerned in the American people a strong ethic …
Toleration—derived from the Latin verb tolerare, menaing to endure, to bear with—refers to “a deliberate choice not to interfere with conduct which is disapproved” (Horton and Nicholson 1992, 2).The term is generally used to describe the actions of both individuals and governments, and an extensive scholarly literature has …
Leo (Lev) N. Tolstoy (1828–1910) was one of the world’s greatest novelists and exercised great social influence in his native Russia. In addition to fiction, his writings touched upon politics, religion, history, and philosophy, and he also lobbied for social and political reforms in Russia. Tolstoy was born …
The United Nations Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Deg rading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person …
Totalitarianism is an ideal that, in practice, applies to any regime that promotes total control of a people in pursuit of the ideological goals of the leadership. Totalitarian rulers seek control through the elimination or co-optation of independent business groups, labor unions, religious bodies, educational institutions, and challengers …
The town hall in New England is the setting for a meeting that is a traditional celebration of community and an egalitarian legislative assembly of voters who make all town policy decisions. This type of meeting stands sharply in contrast to the staged gatherings some American politicians loosely …
A trade bloc is an intergovernmental agreement that brings together a group of countries with the purpose of obtaining mutual economic benefits in international trade. Benefits subsequently result from the reduction or removal of trade tariffs and barriers within member countries. Although most trading blocs are currently immersed …
As a field of study, international political economy seeks to understand the politics of international trade, finance, and monetary relations. Trade diplomacy, as one aspect of trade politics, relates to the process of trade negotiation between states and the influence of domestic and international actors on that process. …
The term tradition has a significant history of usage in the field of political science and particularly in the subfield of political theory. There are, however, to two quite different uses of the term, which are sometimes reflected in dictionary definitions. The root of the term is the …
Garrett Hardin popularized the term tragedy of the commons to denote a consequence of the population problem. Drawing on the work of William Forster Lloyd, Hardin describes a scenario in which an unregulated “commons” fosters decisions by individuals about its use that are designed to maximize each member’s …
Transitional justice includes approaches societies undertake to reckon with legacies of widespread and systematic human rights abuse, mass atrocity, genocide, or civil war as they move from a period of violent conflict or oppression toward peace, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for individual and collective rights. …
During the mid-1970s, the third wave of democratization, a phrase coined by American political scientist Samuel Huntington, started in Western Europe; subsequently, it swept through Latin America and post-communist Europe, including republics of the former Soviet Union. Many countries affected by this wave displayed democratic features, such as …
Transitology is the study of the systemic change process from authoritarian regimes to democracies or to postauthoritarian regimes. Since the late 1970s, after the wave of political transitions swept Greece, Spain, and Portugal and similar changes subsequently occurred in South America, ambitious transitology literature on Latin America and …
The turn of the twenty-first century has been met with a marked growth in economic, social, and political links among people, places, and institutions crossing nation-state borders and, indeed, spanning the world. Described as transnationalism, such patterns of sustained cross-border relationships, exchange, affiliations, and social activity have developed …
