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 vote represents the expression of an individual preference for one or more candidate, or party, selected relative to those candidates and parties not selected. It also is one individual’s contribution to the collective choice of who will be elected. Although thresholds, whether effective or statutory, may introduce …
A voter registration drive is a campaign to register eligible voters. Such efforts are particularly common in countries such as the United States, where there are significant populations of unregistered, eligible voters. Voter registration drives may be nonpartisan or partisan. Since voting is seen both as a basic …
Voting behavior is the primary determinant of political outcomes in democratic politics, and has been studied extensively in political science literature. It is considered not only an individual act but also a collective phenomenon, since it involves aggregating individual choices into an overall electoral result. The analysis of …
The idea of democracy closely relates to the method by which group decisions are made and managed. In this sense, democracy relates to the rules that transform individual preferences into a group preference through voting. However, there are considerable differences between individual decisions and group decisions. While individual …
In the age of technology, elections have come a long way from the days of voting for someone in a loud voice—viva voce. Paper ballots served their purpose, but as of 1996, only 1.7 percent of the registered voters in the United States still made use of them …
Voting is a necessary, yet not sufficient, condition of democratic governance. Voting takes a wide variety of forms—from oral expression of opinions in mass gatherings to electronic recording of preferences in computer terminals. Voting procedures comprise a balloting system as well as a method of determining the winner …
The term suffrage is derived from the Latin suffragium and the ancient Roman political practice of displaying direct support for a candidate or legislative proposal through one’s vote. Voting, however, was formalized first as a public decision-making device in ancient Greek juries and political assemblies in the sixth …
Commonly referred to as the diversionary theory of war or the “scapegoat” hypothesis, this theory posits a close causal relationship between political elites’ domestic political situation and their interest in fostering an external conflict. States that are domestically unstable are more likely to start wars than domestically stable …
War crimes can be defined as violations of the laws and customs of war entailing individual criminal responsibility directly under international law. From the start of warfare to advent of contemporary humanitarian law, more than 500 cartels, codes of conduct, covenants and other texts to regulate hostilities have …
Warlords are nonstate actors who control people and territory through de facto military rule. The militarized groups that the warlords control are similar to gangs or other domestic illegal organizations. These organizations steal from and engage in illicit economic activity. Warlords tend to operate in weak states, where …
War powers, broadly construed, refer to the authorities and responsibilities to initiate, conduct, and terminate hostilities or other military measures taken to defend and preserve the safety of an organized political territory. They include the authority to begin or initiate military hostilities, the authority to mobilize resources necessary …
The term war of independence is generally used interchangeably with war of national liberation. Since the rise of nationalism, wars of independence have become one of the notions that draw the contours of today’s world order. The wars of independence started as particular nations’ fight against imperial powers …
War termination is the cessation of any conflict with a minimum of one thousand battlefield casualties per year. Disagreements exist within the literature on war termination over how to identify when a conflict has been terminated as well as the causes of war termination. Various theories of war …
The most powerful African American leader of his time, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) preached and practiced a gospel of economic self-uplift. In an era when southern states were disenfranchising blacks and rolling back the civil rights they had won during Reconstruction, he encouraged African Americans to suspend the …
Ways and Means is the name of a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest standing committee in the U.S. Congress and is arguably the most powerful. This committee was first established in 1789 as an ad hoc committee …
The term weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is often used to refer to nuclear, biological, chemical, and radiological weapons as a group. Yet there is no widely accepted scholarly or legal definition of WMD. Even the independent, international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission did not define the term …
Sidney Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) were British social reformers and founding members of the Fabian Society, with which their names are inextricably linked. They came from disparate backgrounds but married in 1892 and began a celebrated fifty-year partnership. Sidney’s father was a radical who had worked …
Max Weber (1864–1921) was a German historian, political economist, and sociologist. Educated at the University of Berlin, he taught at the universities of Freiburg (1894–1895), Heidelberg (1896–1899),Vienna (1918), and Munich (1919–1921). He also worked for many prolific years as an independent scholar, a mode of life that he …
Weighted vote systems are systems of decision making by taking a vote in which the principle of equality of the vote (i.e., the principle of “one man, one vote, one value”) is not observed. Instead, electors are divided into groups that are differentiated in the voting process. This …
Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French social, political, and religious philosopher whose writing continues to influence contemporary social ethics, theology, and political theory. Born into a nonreligious Jewish family, Simone showed a gift for languages and moral reasoning at an early age. She studied philosophy at the Lycée …
