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.
Welfare rights are a modern phenomenon in which citizenship is extended to the social reproduction functions of the state. Premodern social protection was often punitive, removing recipients from mainstream society and citizenship. Welfare rights secure entitlement as a matter of citizenship and are constitutive of the welfare state. …
The welfare state was an essentially European invention that spread and developed in the states of western Europe and some of their New World offshoots. What is today known as the welfare state, Sozialstaat, l’état providence, or folkhemmet was most aptly described by historian Asa Briggs in a …
A pessimistic book translated into many languages, The Decline of the West was a two-volume essay published by German philosopher Oswald Spengler between 1918 and 1922, though the first chapters (“Form and Actuality,” or “Gestalt und Wirklichkeit”) in the first volume were certainly written around 1906. The second …
The Westminster model of democracy refers to the British system of government in which executive power is derived from and is accountable to the legislative power. This model of democracy is closely associated with the United Kingdom, and elements of it have been present in the political systems …
Kenneth Clinton Wheare (1907–1979) was an Australian-born political scientist who spent his career in Great Britain and for most of his adult life was associated with Oxford University. He is best known for his work on the English constitution and on federalism. Wheare received a bachelor of arts …
Whips are the members of the party leadership in legislatures who are charged to organize members to vote and to enforce party discipline. The term originated in the British Parliament from the phrase “whipper in,” a hunting assistant who was charged with keeping the dog pack together. In …
Leonard D. White (1891–1958) is recognized as the founder of the academic discipline of American public administration. A native of Acton, Massachusetts, he was a professor at the University of Chicago and a civil servant who held several positions in different levels of government. He received a baccalaureate …
The White Primary was used in some southern states to prevent black citizens from voting. Shortly after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the Democratic Party, which was largely controlled by white citizens, regained dominance of state and local offices throughout the South. Many members of the Democratic Party in …
White supremacy is actualized white racism. Its core tenets include a belief in inherent racial inequality, white superiority, antipathy toward people of color, and a willingness to maintain it through legal and, if necessary, extralegal means. It includes, but cannot be reduced to, prejudicial attitudes and ethnocentric preferences …
Aaron Wildavsky (1930–1993) was an American political scientist who spent the majority of his career teaching at the University of California at Berkley. The son of Jewish immigrants, he attended public schools in Brooklyn, New York, through his childhood. After his graduation from Brooklyn College, where he became …
William of Ockham (c. 1285 to c.1347) was a Franciscan friar and philosopher. He was born in the southern English town of Ockham, entered the Franciscan order, and later was educated at Oxford University, although he never received his theology degree. His early career yielded several significant philosophical …
Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was a literary critic and political commentator whose work had a substantial impact on the political left of the United Kingdom in the years after World War II (1939–1945). Williams excelled in the cloistered academic spaces of Oxford and Cambridge universities, but his work always …
Winner-take-all is an electoral system (used generally in the United States and Canada) in which a winning candidate receives a majority of votes at the general election. The United States inherited the majority election system from Great Britain, where the process for parliamentary elections is termed first past …
The withering away of the state is a concept that places classical Marxism in a differentiating position in socialist political thought from both the statism of other forms of socialism and the antistatism of anarchism. Marxism views the state as an instrument with which one social class maintains …
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian philosopher well known for his work in a number of fields including logic, language, and mathematics. He studied engineering at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1908 and then moved to Manchester, England, where he engaged in aeronautical research. …
Monique Wittig (1935–2003), a French novelist, philosopher, poet, and activist, made important contributions to feminist and gay and lesbian theory by developing an original approach that she labeled materialist feminism. Under this heading, she sought to expose sexual difference as a political division that masquerades as natural and …
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer best known for her passionate defense of women’s moral and intellectual equality. The author of texts in multiple genres, her most influential work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), argues that women’s inferiority to men is not sanctioned …
Womanism is a framework for understanding the matrix of race, class, and gender. This framework explains how groups and individuals experience power and oppression depending on their identity within this matrix, and on their status within the social hierarchy. Womanism uses this concept as a base for advocating …
Because women are physically weaker than men and because the major ity of women around the world live in societies where power resides in the hands of men, females of all ages remain vulnerable to violence. The United Nations estimates that one in ever y three of the …
The inclusion of women in security studies results from the confluence of several trends in both the study and practice of international relations. Within the academy, there has been a growing realization that disaggregating along gender lines (along with other identities) is analytically useful. In the policy and …
