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Democracy
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What is Democracy?

Democracy is one of the most examined concepts in political science, philosophy, and public administration courses. It raises fundamental questions about how power is distributed, how citizens participate in governance, and what makes a form of government legitimate or stable. The topic spans ancient philosophy and contemporary policy, making it relevant across disciplines from government and history to international development studies. Its enduring complexity—balancing majority rule with individual rights, and stability with reform—gives students substantial intellectual ground to cover in academic writing.

The papers archived on this topic reflect a wide range of approaches. Comparative analysis appears frequently, including contrasts between democratic philosophies drawn from figures like Pericles and Plato, whose competing visions of governance and justice anchor several essays. Historical and regional case studies are also common, with papers examining democratic development in Latin America since the 1980s, roadblocks to democracy in Iraq, reform movements in Egypt, and political conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. Some essays take a normative angle, weighing whether democracy is the most viable form of government, while others apply frameworks from public administration or international development to assess how democratic institutions function in practice.

A strong essay on democracy requires a focused thesis that moves beyond simply defining the term toward arguing a specific claim about how, why, or where democratic systems succeed or struggle. Evidence drawn from historical events, regional case studies, or well-grounded political theory carries the most weight. The most common pitfall is treating democracy as a single, uniform system—strong essays acknowledge that democratic structures vary significantly across countries and contexts, and that this variation is analytically important rather than incidental.

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Paper High School

Thoreau's Civil Disobedience: Idealism and Its Limits

Henry David Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience" was ostensibly written to defend the author's refusal to pay taxes to support the Mexican-American War. However, upon closer analysis of the essay, Thoreau's nonpayment emerges as more vague and anarchist in nature than a calculated political action. This is despite the fact that the work later inspired so many meaningful movements for political change.

Essay Doctorate

Ancient Greek Contributions to Democracy, Philosophy, and Science

It is generally well-known around the world -- at least in Western society -- that the ancient Greeks are noted for having launched the system of democracy. At the very lease the ancient Greeks started a kind of…

Paper Undergraduate

Four Circles Model for Improving Inner-City Schools

Inner city public schools have been struggling to give children a good education for years in Trenton, NJ, but unfortunately there apparently has not been the finances, the sense of hope, and the will to make the changes needed. That said, it will not be an easy task to make inner city schools better because the communities those schools are located in are mired in poverty, crime, and unemployment. Communities are reflected in their schools and schools are a reflection of that community.

Research Paper Doctorate

Athenian Empire vs. Alexander the Great's Empire Compared

¶ … Athenian Empire to Alexander the Great's Empire as the two main efforts to unify and expand ancient Greece. Ancient Greece played a vital role in the civilization and culture of the world.

Research Paper Doctorate

Music Censorship in Rock and Rap: History and Impact

Censorship Under the Guise of Protecting the Children

Paper Doctorate

Love and Philosophy in Plato's Symposium Explained

In order to answer the question of what 'love' means to Plato/Socrates in the Symposium, the most important aspect is to explain how the other participants define it before Socrates weighs in with his more philosophical…

Research Paper Doctorate

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Sources and Influences

The Lord of the Rings forms a significant part of the substantial canon of works written by the English author and academic J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) set in his invented world of Middle Earth.

Essay Undergraduate

Winthrop's Non-Democracy in The Puritan Dilemma

A democracy is a system of government wherein the governed have a voice. In the simplest terms, it is a government by and for the people. In the present, the United States government is based upon the idea of…

Paper Undergraduate

US Hegemony and the Continuity of Imperial Foreign Policy

To state that there are no fundamental differences between international politics in 1900-45 and afterwards would be to carry the argument to an extreme, even though the continuities are greater than the discontinuities. Above all else, the liberal, democratic states and empires in the U.S. and Western Europe were highly interventionist and aggressive in the developing world and Global South long before World War II, and this did not change in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Even governments that were democratically elected were sometimes overthrown and replaced by more pliable regimes, such as the ‘friendly' dictators of Central America and the Caribbean. At the same time, though, there has also been far more harmony and cooperation between the Great Powers since 1945 than in the previous fifty years, especially through NATO and the European Union. America's alliance with Japan, Britain, France and Germany has survived various stresses and strains over the decades, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this requires an explanation. None of the imperial powers has fought a major war since the invention of nuclear weapons, even though they have intervened frequently against the non-nuclear states of the developing world. Perhaps this alliance is explained by political and ideological affinities, as liberals maintain, or by cultural affinities as opposed to Muslim and Orthodox civilizations, as Samuel Huntington explains—although admittedly Japan is left as quite an outlier here.

Paper Doctorate

Santa Anna's Dictatorship: Revisionist Biography and Legacy

In his self-described revisionist biography Santa Anna of Mexico (2007), Will Fowler has courageously taken up the defense of the Mexico caudillo, fully aware that he is all but universally reviled in the historiography of the United States and Mexico. From the beginning, he made his intention clear to vindicate the reputation of a dictator whose "vilification has been so thorough and effective that the process of deconstructing the numerous lies that have been told and retold" is almost impossible. He is the tyrant that "all Mexicans (and Texans) love to hate", blamed for losing the Mexican War for a "fistful of dollars" and selling another large part of it for personal gain with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Timothy J. Henderson asserted that "Mexicans ever since have blamed him for many, if not most, of the misfortunes their country suffered." He had a great talent for exploiting and manipulating political divisions but none for governing a country. In U.S. history and popular culture, he has always been portrayed as a corrupt megalomaniac, the ‘Napoleon of the West', responsible for the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad. As John Chasteen and James Wood put it, even his autobiography was an "extraordinary work of self-dramatization" by a dictator who put on a show of being a "vulnerable, introspective protagonist" but was in reality a power-hungry tyrant with "unmitigated vanity" and "obvious self-absorption."

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