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The Public, the Political System and American Democracy

Most say ‘design and structure’ of government need big changes, survey report.

At a time of growing stress on democracy around the world, Americans generally agree on democratic ideals and values that are important for the United States. But for the most part, they see the country falling well short in living up to these ideals, according to a new study of opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of key aspects of American democracy and the political system.

The public’s criticisms of the political system run the gamut, from a failure to hold elected officials accountable to a lack of transparency in government. And just a third say the phrase “people agree on basic facts even if they disagree politically” describes this country well today.

The perceived shortcomings encompass some of the core elements of American democracy. An overwhelming share of the public (84%) says it is very important that “the rights and freedoms of all people are respected.” Yet just 47% say this describes the country very or somewhat well; slightly more (53%) say it does not.

Despite these criticisms, most Americans say democracy is working well in the United States – though relatively few say it is working very well. At the same time, there is broad support for making sweeping changes to the political system: 61% say “significant changes” are needed in the fundamental “design and structure” of American government to make it work for current times.

The public sends mixed signals about how the American political system should be changed, and no proposals attract bipartisan support. Yet in views of how many of the specific aspects of the political system are working, both Republicans and Democrats express dissatisfaction.

To be sure, there are some positives. A sizable majority of Americans (74%) say the military leadership in the U.S. does not publicly support one party over another, and nearly as many (73%) say the phrase “people are free to peacefully protest” describes this country very or somewhat well.

In general, however, there is a striking mismatch between the public’s goals for American democracy and its views of whether they are being fulfilled. On 23 specific measures assessing democracy, the political system and elections in the United States – each widely regarded by the public as very important – there are only eight on which majorities say the country is doing even somewhat well.

The new survey of the public’s views of democracy and the political system by Pew Research Center was conducted online Jan. 29-Feb. 13 among 4,656 adults. It was supplemented by a survey conducted March 7-14 among 1,466 adults on landlines and cellphones.

Among the major findings:

Mixed views of structural changes in the political system. The surveys examine several possible changes to representative democracy in the United States. Most Americans reject the idea of amending the Constitution to give states with larger populations more seats in the U.S. Senate, and there is little support for expanding the size of the House of Representatives. As in the past, however, a majority (55%) supports changing the way presidents are elected so that the candidate who receives the most total votes nationwide – rather than a majority in the Electoral College – wins the presidency.

A majority says Trump lacks respect for democratic institutions. Fewer than half of Americans (45%) say Donald Trump has a great deal or fair amount of respect for the country’s democratic institutions and traditions, while 54% say he has not too much respect or no respect. These views are deeply split along partisan and ideological lines. Most conservative Republicans (55%) say Trump has a “great deal” of respect for democratic institutions; most liberal Democrats (60%) say he has no respect “at all” for these traditions and institutions.

Government and politics seen as working better locally than nationally. Far more Americans have a favorable opinion of their local government (67%) than of the federal government (35%). In addition, there is substantial satisfaction with the quality of candidates running for Congress and local elections in recent elections. That stands in contrast with views of the recent presidential candidates; just 41% say the quality of presidential candidates in recent elections has been good.

Few say tone of political debate is ‘respectful.’ Just a quarter of Americans say “the tone of debate among political leaders is respectful” is a statement that describes the country well. However, the public is more divided in general views about tone and discourse: 55% say too many people are “easily offended” over the language others use; 45% say people need to be more careful in using language “to avoid offending” others.

Americans don’t spare themselves from criticism. In addressing the shortcomings of the political system, Americans do not spare themselves from criticism: Just 39% say “voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues” describes the country very or somewhat well. In addition, a 56% majority say they have little or no confidence in the political wisdom of the American people. However, that is less negative than in early 2016, when 64% had little or no confidence. Since the presidential election, Republicans have become more confident in people’s political wisdom.

Cynicism about money and politics. Most Americans think that those who donate a lot of money to elected officials have more political influence than others. An overwhelming majority (77%) supports limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns and issues. And nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say new laws could be effective in reducing the role of money in politics.

Varying views of obligations of good citizenship. Large majorities say it is very important to vote, pay taxes and always follow the law in order to be a good citizen. Half of Americans say it is very important to know the Pledge of Allegiance, while 45% say it is very important to protest government actions a person believes is wrong. Just 36% say displaying the American flag is very important to being a good citizen.

Most are aware of basic facts about political system and democracy. Overwhelming shares correctly identify the constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution and know the role of the Electoral College. A narrower majority knows how a tied vote is broken in the Senate, while fewer than half know the number of votes needed to break a Senate filibuster. ( Take the civics knowledge quiz .)

Democracy seen as working well, but most say ‘significant changes’ are needed

In general terms, most Americans think U.S. democracy is working at least somewhat well. Yet a 61% majority says “significant changes” are needed in the fundamental “design and structure” of American government to make it work in current times. When asked to compare the U.S. political system with those of other developed nations, fewer than half rate it “above average” or “best in the world.”

Overall, nearly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say democracy in the United States is working very or somewhat well, though just 18% say it is working very well. Four-in-ten say it is working not too well or not at all well.

Republicans have more positive views of the way democracy is working than do Democrats: 72% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say democracy in the U.S. is working at least somewhat well, though only 30% say it is working very well. Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, 48% say democracy works at least somewhat well, with just 7% saying it is working very well.

More Democrats than Republicans say significant changes are needed in the design and structure of government. By more than two-to-one (68% to 31%), Democrats say significant changes are needed. Republicans are evenly divided: 50% say significant changes are needed in the structure of government, while 49% say the current structure serves the country well and does not need significant changes.

The public has mixed evaluations of the nation’s political system compared with those of other developed countries. About four-in-ten say the U.S. political system is the best in the world (15%) or above average (26%); most say it is average (28%) or below average (29%), when compared with other developed nations. Several other national institutions and aspects of life in the U.S. – including the military, standard of living and scientific achievements – are more highly rated than the political system.

Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to say the U.S. political system is best in the world or above average (58% vs. 27%). As recently as four years ago, there were no partisan differences in these opinions.

Bipartisan criticism of political system in a number of areas

Majorities in both parties say “people are free to peacefully protest” describes the U.S. well. And there is bipartisan sentiment that the military leadership in the U.S. does not publicly favor one party over another.

In most cases, however, partisans differ on how well the country lives up to democratic ideals – or majorities in both parties say it is falling short.

Some of the most pronounced partisan differences are in views of equal opportunity in the U.S. and whether the rights and freedoms of all people are respected.

Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to say “everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed” describes the United States very or somewhat well (74% vs. 37%).

A majority of Republicans (60%) say the rights and freedoms of all people are respected in the United States, compared with just 38% of Democrats.

And while only about half of Republicans (49%) say the country does well in respecting “the views of people who are not in the majority on issues,” even fewer Democrats (34%) say this.

No more than about a third in either party say elected officials who engage in misconduct face serious consequences or that government “conducts its work openly and transparently.” Comparably small shares in both parties (28% of Republicans, 25% of Democrats) say the following sentence describes the country well: “People who give a lot of money to elected officials do not have more political influence than other people.”

Fewer than half in both parties also say news organizations do not favor one political party, though Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say this describes the country well (38% vs. 18%). There also is skepticism in both parties about the political independence of judges. Nearly half of Democrats (46%) and 38% of Republicans say judges are not influenced by political parties.

Partisan gaps in opinions about many aspects of U.S. elections

For the most part, Democrats and Republicans agree about the importance of many principles regarding elections in the U.S.

Overwhelming shares in both parties say it is very important that elections are free from tampering (91% of Republicans, 88% of Democrats say this) and that voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues (78% in both parties).

But there are some notable differences: Republicans are almost 30 percentage points more likely than Democrats to say it is very important that “no ineligible voters are permitted to vote” (83% of Republicans vs. 55% of Democrats).

And while majorities in both parties say high turnout in presidential elections is very important, more Democrats (76%) than Republicans (64%) prioritize high voter turnout.

The differences are even starker in evaluations of how well the country is doing in fulfilling many of these objectives. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that “no eligible voters are prevented from voting” describes elections in the U.S. very or somewhat well (80% vs. 56%). By contrast, more Democrats (76%) than Republicans (42%) say “no ineligible voters are permitted to vote” describes elections well.

Democrats – particularly politically engaged Democrats – are critical of the process for determining congressional districts. A majority of Republicans (63%) say the way congressional voting districts are determined is fair and reasonable compared with just 39% of Democrats; among Democrats who are highly politically engaged, just 29% say the process is fair.

And fewer Democrats than Republicans consider voter turnout for elections in the U.S. – both presidential and local – to be “high.” Nearly three-quarters of Republicans (73%) say “there is high voter turnout in presidential elections” describes elections well, compared with only about half of Democrats (52%).

Still, there are a few points of relative partisan agreement: Majorities in both parties (62% of Republicans, 55% of Democrats) say “elections are free from tampering.” And Republicans and Democrats are about equally skeptical about whether voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues (40% of Republicans, 38% of Democrats).

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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The Top Ten Most-Read Essays of 2021

In 2021, democracy’s fortunes were tested, and a tumultuous world became even more turbulent. Democratic setbacks arose in places as far flung as Burma, El Salvador, Tunisia, and Sudan, and a 20-year experiment in Afghanistan collapsed in days. The world’s democracies were beset by rising polarization, and people watched in shock as an insurrection took place in the United States. In a year marked by high political drama, economic unrest, and rising assaults on democracy, we at the  Journal of Democracy  sought to provide insight and analysis of the forces that imperil freedom. Here are our 10 most-read essays of 2021:

Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez Nayib Bukele has developed a blend of political tactics that combines populist appeals and classic autocratic behavior with a polished social-media brand. It poses a dire threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

287 American Politics Essay Topics

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• Is the USA a Democracy? American Politics Although the United States of America prides itself on being the first democratic country, an opinion that the US is not a democracy has been gaining more traction in recent years.
• Health Care Reform and American Politics The United States of America has long been striving to enact health insurance reform and it eventually became possible with Obama in charge.
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• Obama’s Healthcare Reform and Organizational Decision-Making Talking of organizational decision making, Obama’s push for comprehensive healthcare legislation has been a source of intriguing insights.
• Education Policy by President Barack Obama Barack Obama and Joe Bidden’s education policy is based on the fact that American children cannot stand any more neglect and indifference in their education system.
• The Necessity of Obama’s Health Care Plan This paper argues that President Obama’s reformed health care plan was not necessary and has accommodated more tribulations than solving the problems that were being encountered.
• US Healthcare Policy: Obama’s Healthcare Reform President Barak Obama has a hard task ahead in making sure that the health situation of the country is addressed.
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• The Rise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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• Barrack Obama’s First Speech as the US President
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Essays on Contemporary American Politics

In contrast to most of modern American political history, partisan control of our national elective institutions has been unusually tenuous during the past several decades. This essay series argues that the ideologically sorted parties that contest elections today face strong internal pressures to overreach, by which I mean emphasizing issues and advocating positions strongly supported by the party base but which cause the marginal members of their electoral coalitions to defect. Thus, electoral losses predictably follow electoral victories. Institutional control is fleeting. The first group of essays describes the contemporary American electorate. Despite myriad claims to the contrary, the data show that the electorate is no more polarized now than it was in the later decades of the twentieth century. What has happened is that the parties have sorted so that each party is more homogeneous than in the twentieth century; liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have largely passed from the political scene. The muddled middle is as large as ever but has no home in either party. The growth in the proportion of self-identified independents may be a reflection of the limited appeal of today’s sorted parties. The second group of essays develops the overreach argument, discusses the role of independents as the marginal members of an electoral majority, and explains how party sorting produces less split-ticket voting. Rather than most voters being more set in their partisan allegiances than a generation ago, they may simply have less reason to split their tickets when almost all Democratic candidates are liberals and all Republican candidates are conservatives. The third group of essays embeds contemporary American politics in two other contexts. First, in a comparative context, developments in the European democracies are the mirror image of those in the United States: the major European parties have depolarized or de-sorted or both, whereas their national electorates show little change. The rise of anti-immigrant parties may have some as yet not well-understood role in these developments. Second, in a historical context, the instability of American majorities today resembles that of the late nineteenth century, when similar significant social and economic changes were occurring. A final postelection essay will wrap up the series.

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How American Politics Went Insane

It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.

I t’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.

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On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.

As the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes.

I could continue, but you get the gist. Yes, the political future I’ve described is unreal. But it is also a linear extrapolation of several trends on vivid display right now. Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.

The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.

Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.

And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.

No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.

Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome .

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them. Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new, and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.

Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction. Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the etiology of a political disease: the immune system that defended the body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis and treatment.

Why the political class is a good thing

The Founders knew all too well about chaos. It was the condition that brought them together in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. The central government had too few powers and powers of the wrong kinds, so they gave it more powers, and also multiple power centers. The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise.

The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on.

They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can. By and large, American politicians are independent operators, and they became even more independent when later reforms, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, neutered the Electoral College and established direct election to the Senate.

The Constitution makes no mention of many of the essential political structures that we take for granted, such as political parties and congressional committees. If the Constitution were all we had, politicians would be incapable of getting organized to accomplish even routine tasks. Every day, for every bill or compromise, they would have to start from scratch, rounding up hundreds of individual politicians and answering to thousands of squabbling constituencies and millions of voters. By itself, the Constitution is a recipe for chaos.

So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that bound politicians into coherent teams. Personal alliances, financial contributions, promotions and prestige, political perks, pork-barrel spending, endorsements, and sometimes a trip to the woodshed or the wilderness: All of those incentives and others, including some of dubious respectability, came into play. If the Constitution was the system’s DNA, the parties and machines and political brokers were its RNA, translating the Founders’ bare-bones framework into dynamic organizations and thus converting conflict into action.

The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pac s, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen , because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government.”

The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers.

Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them. Politics seemed almost to organize itself, but only because the middlemen recruited and nurtured political talent, vetted candidates for competence and loyalty, gathered and dispensed money, built bases of donors and supporters, forged coalitions, bought off antagonists, mediated disputes, brokered compromises, and greased the skids to turn those compromises into law. Though sometimes arrogant, middlemen were not generally elitist. They excelled at organizing and representing unsophisticated voters, as Tammany Hall famously did for the working-class Irish of New York, to the horror of many Progressives who viewed the Irish working class as unfit to govern or even to vote.

The old machines were inclusive only by the standards of their day, of course. They were bad on race—but then, so were Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is the ever-present potential for corruption, which is a real problem. On the other hand, overreacting to the threat of corruption by stamping out influence-peddling (as distinct from bribery and extortion) is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents. When a party raised a soft-money donation from a millionaire and used it to support a candidate’s campaign (a common practice until the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banned it in federal elections), the exchange of favors tied a knot of mutual accountability that linked candidate, party, and donor together and forced each to think about the interests of the others. Such transactions may not have comported with the Platonic ideal of democracy, but in the real world they did much to stabilize the system and discourage selfish behavior.

Middlemen have a characteristic that is essential in politics: They stick around. Because careerists and hacks make their living off the system, they have a stake in assembling durable coalitions, in retaining power over time, and in keeping the government in functioning order. Slash-and-burn protests and quixotic ideological crusades are luxuries they can’t afford. Insurgents and renegades have a role, which is to jolt the system with new energy and ideas; but professionals also have a role, which is to safely absorb the energy that insurgents unleash. Think of them as analogous to antibodies and white blood cells, establishing and patrolling the barriers between the body politic and would-be hijackers on the outside. As with biology, so with politics: When the immune system works, it is largely invisible. Only when it breaks down do we become aware of its importance.

Vulnerability

How the war on middlemen left america defenseless.

Beginning early in the 20th century, and continuing right up to the present, reformers and the public turned against every aspect of insider politics: professional politicians, closed-door negotiations, personal favors, party bosses, financial ties, all of it. Progressives accused middlemen of subverting the public interest; populists accused them of obstructing the people’s will; conservatives accused them of protecting and expanding big government.

To some extent, the reformers were right. They had good intentions and valid complaints. Back in the 1970s, as a teenager in the post-Watergate era, I was on their side. Why allow politicians ever to meet behind closed doors? Sunshine is the best disinfectant! Why allow private money to buy favors and distort policy making? Ban it and use Treasury funds to finance elections! It was easy, in those days, to see that there was dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water was dirty, which was the baby. So we started reforming.

We reformed the nominating process. The use of primary elections instead of conventions, caucuses, and other insider-dominated processes dates to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, but primary elections and party influence coexisted through the 1960s; especially in congressional and state races, party leaders had many ways to influence nominations and vet candidates. According to Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H. W. Bush, here is how Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, got started in politics: “Samuel F. Pryor, a top Pan Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. ‘If you would,’ Pryor said, ‘I think we can assure you that you’ll be the nominee.’ ” Today, party insiders can still jawbone a little bit, but, as the 2016 presidential race has made all too clear, there is startlingly little they can do to influence the nominating process.

Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016, only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who hew to ideological orthodoxy.” By contrast, party hacks tend to shop for candidates who exert broad appeal in a general election and who will sustain and build the party’s brand, so they generally lean toward relative moderates and team players.

Moreover, recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge incumbents. “In congressional districts across the country, party leaders were able to carefully select candidates who would contribute to the collective good of the ticket,” Carson and Roberts write in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time . “This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries, in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and thereby made general elections less competitive. “A series of reforms that were intended to create more open and less ‘insider’ dominated elections actually produced more entrenched politicians,” Carson and Roberts write. The paradoxical result is that members of Congress today are simultaneously less responsive to mainstream interests and harder to dislodge.

Was the switch to direct public nomination a net benefit or drawback? The answer to that question is subjective. But one effect is not in doubt: Institutionalists have less power than ever before to protect loyalists who play well with other politicians, or who take a tough congressional vote for the team, or who dare to cross single-issue voters and interests; and they have little capacity to fend off insurgents who owe nothing to anybody. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts, incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader who, in a shocking upset, lost to an unknown Tea Partier in his 2014 primary. Legislators are scared of voting for anything that might increase the odds of a primary challenge, which is one reason it is so hard to raise the debt limit or pass a budget.

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In March, when Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told a Rotary Club meeting that he thought President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee deserved a Senate hearing, the Tea Party Patriots immediately responded with what has become activists’ go-to threat: “It’s this kind of outrageous behavior that leads Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund activists and supporters to think seriously about encouraging Dr. Milton Wolf”—a physician and Tea Party activist—“to run against Sen. Moran in the August GOP primary.” (Moran hastened to issue a statement saying that he would oppose Obama’s nominee regardless.) Purist issue groups often have the whip hand now, and unlike the elected bosses of yore, they are accountable only to themselves and are able merely to prevent legislative action, not to organize it.

We reformed political money. Starting in the 1970s, large-dollar donations to candidates and parties were subject to a tightening web of regulations. The idea was to reduce corruption (or its appearance) and curtail the power of special interests—certainly laudable goals. Campaign-finance rules did stop some egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to private channels. Whereas the parties themselves were once largely responsible for raising and spending political money, in their place has arisen a burgeoning ecology of deep-pocketed donors, super pac s, 501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups that now spend hundreds of millions of dollars each cycle. The result has been the creation of an array of private political machines across the country: for instance, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads on the right, and Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate on the left.

Private groups are much harder to regulate, less transparent, and less accountable than are the parties and candidates, who do, at the end of the day, have to face the voters. Because they thrive on purism, protest, and parochialism, the outside groups are driving politics toward polarization, extremism, and short-term gain. “You may win or lose, but at least you have been intellectually consistent—your principles haven’t been defeated,” an official with Americans for Prosperity told The Economist in October 2014. The parties, despite being called to judgment by voters for their performance, face all kinds of constraints and regulations that the private groups don’t, tilting the playing field against them. “The internal conversation we’ve been having is ‘How do we keep state parties alive?’ ” the director of a mountain-state Democratic Party organization told me and Raymond J. La Raja recently for a Brookings Institution report. Republicans told us the same story. “We believe we are fighting for our lives in the current legal and judicial framework, and the super pac s and (c)(4)s really present a direct threat to the state parties’ existence,” a southern state’s Republican Party director said.

The state parties also told us they can’t begin to match the advertising money flowing from outside groups and candidates. Weakened by regulations and resource constraints, they have been reduced to spectators, while candidates and groups form circular firing squads and alienate voters. At the national level, the situation is even more chaotic—and ripe for exploitation by a savvy demagogue who can make himself heard above the din, as Donald Trump has so shrewdly proved.

We reformed Congress. For a long time, seniority ruled on Capitol Hill. To exercise power, you had to wait for years, and chairs ran their committees like fiefs. It was an arrangement that hardly seemed either meritocratic or democratic. Starting with a rebellion by the liberal post-Watergate class in the ’70s, and then accelerating with the rise of Newt Gingrich and his conservative revolutionaries in the ’90s, the seniority and committee systems came under attack and withered. Power on the Hill has flowed both up to a few top leaders and down to individual members. Unfortunately, the reformers overlooked something important: Seniority and committee spots rewarded teamwork and loyalty, they ensured that people at the top were experienced, and they harnessed hundreds of middle-ranking members of Congress to the tasks of legislating. Compounding the problem, Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries, eager to prove their anti-Washington bona fides, cut committee staffs by a third, further diminishing Congress’s institutional horsepower.

Congress’s attempts to replace hierarchies and middlemen with top-down diktat and ad hoc working groups have mostly failed. More than perhaps ever before, Congress today is a collection of individual entrepreneurs and pressure groups. In the House, disintermediation has shifted the balance of power toward a small but cohesive minority of conservative Freedom Caucus members who think nothing of wielding their power against their own leaders. Last year, as House Republicans struggled to agree on a new speaker, the conservatives did not blush at demanding “the right to oppose their leaders and vote down legislation without repercussions,” as Time magazine reported. In the Senate, Ted Cruz made himself a leading presidential contender by engaging in debt-limit brinkmanship and deriding the party’s leadership, going so far as to call Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. “The rhetoric—and confrontational stance—are classic Cruz,” wrote Burgess Everett in Politico last October: “Stake out a position to the right of where his leaders will end up, criticize them for ignoring him and conservative grass-roots voters, then use the ensuing internecine fight to stoke his presidential bid.” No wonder his colleagues detest him. But Cruz was doing what makes sense in an age of maximal political individualism, and we can safely bet that his success will inspire imitation.

We reformed closed-door negotiations. As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily retreat behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills anonymously, with only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory committees, too, could meet off the record. Understandably, in the wake of Watergate, those practices came to be viewed as suspect. Today, federal law, congressional rules, and public expectations have placed almost all formal deliberations and many informal ones in full public view. One result is greater transparency, which is good. But another result is that finding space for delicate negotiations and candid deliberations can be difficult. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest groups and grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is halfway settled.

Despite promising to televise negotiations over health-care reform, President Obama went behind closed doors with interest groups to put the package together; no sane person would have negotiated in full public view. In 2013, Congress succeeded in approving a modest bipartisan budget deal in large measure because the House and Senate Budget Committee chairs were empowered to “figure it out themselves, very, very privately,” as one Democratic aide told Jill Lawrence for a 2015 Brookings report. TV cameras, recorded votes, and public markups do increase transparency, but they come at the cost of complicating candid conversations. “The idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong,” the Democratic former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle wrote in 2014, in his foreword to the book City of Rivals . “The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.”

We reformed pork. For most of American history, a principal goal of any member of Congress was to bring home bacon for his district. Pork-barrel spending never really cost very much, and it helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders, it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward loyalists. Starting in the ’70s, however, and then snowballing in the ’90s, the regular appropriations process broke down, a casualty of reforms that weakened appropriators’ power, of “sunshine laws” that reduced their autonomy, and of polarization that complicated negotiations. Conservatives and liberals alike attacked pork-barreling as corrupt, culminating in early 2011, when a strange-bedfellows coalition of Tea Partiers and progressives banned earmarking, the practice of dropping goodies into bills as a way to attract votes—including, ironically, votes for politically painful spending reductions .

Congress has not passed all its annual appropriations bills in 20 years, and more than $300 billion a year in federal spending goes out the door without proper authorization. Routine business such as passing a farm bill or a surface-transportation bill now takes years instead of weeks or months to complete. Today two-thirds of federal-program spending (excluding interest on the national debt) runs on formula-driven autopilot. This automatic spending by so-called entitlement programs eludes the discipline of being regularly voted on, dwarfs old-fashioned pork in magnitude, and is so hard to restrain that it’s often called the “third rail” of politics. The political cost has also been high: Congressional leaders lost one of their last remaining tools to induce followership and team play. “Trying to be a leader where you have no sticks and very few carrots is dang near impossible,” the Republican former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told CNN in 2013, shortly after renegade Republicans pointlessly shut down the government. “Members don’t get anything from you and leaders don’t give anything. They don’t feel like you can reward them or punish them.”

Like campaign contributions and smoke-filled rooms, pork is a tool of democratic governance, not a violation of it. It can be used for corrupt purposes but also, very often, for vital ones. As the political scientist Diana Evans wrote in a 2004 book, Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress , “The irony is this: pork barreling, despite its much maligned status, gets things done.” In 1964, to cite one famous example, Lyndon Johnson could not have passed his landmark civil-rights bill without support from House Republican leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, who named his price: a nasa research grant for his district, which LBJ was glad to provide. Just last year, Republican Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked how his committee managed to pass bipartisan authorization bills year after year, even as the rest of Congress ground to a legislative standstill. In part, McCain explained, it was because “there’s a lot in there for members of the committees.”

Party-dominated nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business. But sweep them all away, and one finds that business is not getting done at all. The political reforms of the past 40 or so years have pushed toward disintermediation—by favoring amateurs and outsiders over professionals and insiders; by privileging populism and self-expression over mediation and mutual restraint; by stripping middlemen of tools they need to organize the political system. All of the reforms promote an individualistic, atomized model of politics in which there are candidates and there are voters, but there is nothing in between. Other, larger trends, to be sure, have also contributed to political disorganization, but the war on middlemen has amplified and accelerated them.

Donald Trump and other viruses

By the beginning of this decade, the political system’s organic defenses against outsiders and insurgents were visibly crumbling. All that was needed was for the right virus to come along and exploit the opening. As it happened, two came along.

In 2009, on the heels of President Obama’s election and the economic-bailout packages, angry fiscal conservatives launched the Tea Party insurgency and watched, somewhat to their own astonishment, as it swept the country. Tea Partiers shared some of the policy predilections of loyal Republican partisans, but their mind-set was angrily anti-establishment. In a 2013 Pew Research poll, more than 70 percent of them disapproved of Republican leaders in Congress. In a 2010 Pew poll, they had rejected compromise by similar margins. They thought nothing of mounting primary challenges against Republican incumbents, and they made a special point of targeting Republicans who compromised with Democrats or even with Republican leaders. In Congress, the Republican House leadership soon found itself facing a GOP caucus whose members were too worried about “getting primaried” to vote for the compromises necessary to govern—or even to keep the government open. Threats from the Tea Party and other purist factions often outweigh any blandishments or protection that leaders can offer.

So far the Democrats have been mostly spared the anti-compromise insurrection, but their defenses are not much stronger. Molly Ball recently reported for The Atlantic ’s Web site on the Working Families Party, whose purpose is “to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans.” Because African Americans and union members still mostly behave like party loyalists, and because the Democratic base does not want to see President Obama fail, the Tea Party trick hasn’t yet worked on the left. But the Democrats are vulnerable structurally, and the anti-compromise virus is out there.

A second virus was initially identified in 2002, by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work . It’s a shocking book, one whose implications other scholars were understandably reluctant to engage with. The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, however, makes confronting its thesis unavoidable.

Using polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25 and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have a severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful. Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists . From that premise, they conclude that all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven personal agendas.

If politicians won’t do the job, then who will? Politiphobes, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, believe policy should be made not by messy political conflict and negotiations but by ensid s: empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers. These are leaders who will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special interests, and implement long-overdue solutions. ensid s can be politicians, technocrats, or autocrats—whatever works. Whether the process is democratic is not particularly important.

Chances are that politiphobes have been out there since long before Hibbing and Theiss-Morse identified them in 2002. Unlike the Tea Party or the Working Families Party, they aren’t particularly ideological: They have popped up left, right, and center. Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacies of 1992 and 1996 appealed to the idea that any sensible businessman could knock heads together and fix Washington. In 2008, Barack Obama pandered to a center-left version of the same fantasy, promising to magically transcend partisan politics and implement the best solutions from both parties.

No previous outbreak, however, compares with the latest one, which draws unprecedented virulence from two developments. One is a steep rise in antipolitical sentiment, especially on the right. According to polling by Pew, from 2007 to early 2016 the percentage of Americans saying they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who had been an elected official in Washington for many years than for an outsider candidate more than doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. Republican opinion has shifted more sharply still: The percentage of Republicans preferring “new ideas and a different approach” over “experience and a proven record” almost doubled in just the six months from March to September of 2015.

The other development, of course, was Donald Trump, the perfect vector to concentrate politiphobic sentiment, intensify it, and inject it into presidential politics. He had too much money and free media to be spent out of the race. He had no political record to defend. He had no political debts or party loyalty. He had no compunctions. There was nothing to restrain him from sounding every note of the politiphobic fantasy with perfect pitch.

Democrats have not been immune, either. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a “revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor cared—because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared—that his plans for governing were delusional.

Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them in.

The disorder that exacerbates all other disorders

There is nothing new about political insurgencies in the United States—nor anything inherently wrong with them. Just the opposite, in fact: Insurgencies have brought fresh ideas and renewed participation to the political system since at least the time of Andrew Jackson.

There is also nothing new about insiders losing control of the presidential nominating process. In 1964 and 1972, to the dismay of party regulars, nominations went to unelectable candidates—Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in 1964 and George McGovern for the Democrats in 1972—who thrilled the parties’ activist bases and went on to predictably epic defeats. So it’s tempting to say, “Democracy is messy. Insurgents have fair gripes. Incumbents should be challenged. Who are you, Mr. Establishment, to say the system is broken merely because you don’t like the people it is pushing forward?”

The problem is not, however, that disruptions happen. The problem is that chaos syndrome wreaks havoc on the system’s ability to absorb and channel disruptions. Trying to quash political disruptions would probably only create more of them. The trick is to be able to govern through them.

Leave aside the fact that Goldwater and McGovern, although ideologues, were estimable figures within their parties. (McGovern actually co-chaired a Democratic Party commission that rewrote the nominating rules after 1968, opening the way for his own campaign.) Neither of them, either as senator or candidate, wanted to or did disrupt the ordinary workings of government.

Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of City of Rivals , likes to point out that within three weeks of Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, the president was signing new laws again. “While they were impeaching him they were negotiating, they were talking, they were having committee hearings,” Grumet said in a recent speech. “And so we have to ask ourselves, what is it that not long ago allowed our government to metabolize the aggression that is inherent in any pluralistic society and still get things done?”

I have been covering Washington since the early 1980s, and I’ve seen a lot of gridlock. Sometimes I’ve been grateful for gridlock, which is an appropriate outcome when there is no working majority for a particular policy. For me, however, 2011 brought a wake-up call. The system was failing even when there was a working majority. That year, President Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, in intense personal negotiations, tried to clinch a budget agreement that touched both parties’ sacred cows, curtailing growth in the major entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security by hundreds of billions of dollars and increasing revenues by $800 billion or more over 10 years, as well as reducing defense and nondefense discretionary spending by more than $1 trillion. Though it was less grand than previous budgetary “grand bargains,” the package represented the kind of bipartisan accommodation that constitutes the federal government’s best and perhaps only path to long-term fiscal stability.

People still debate why the package fell apart, and there is blame enough to go around. My own reading at the time, however, concurred with Matt Bai’s postmortem in The New York Times : Democratic leaders could have found the rank-and-file support they needed to pass the bargain, but Boehner could not get the deal past conservatives in his own caucus. “What’s undeniable, despite all the furious efforts to peddle a different story,” Bai wrote, “is that Obama managed to persuade his closest allies to sign off on what he wanted them to do, and Boehner didn’t, or couldn’t.” We’ll never know, but I believe that the kind of budget compromise Boehner and Obama tried to shake hands on, had it reached a vote, would have passed with solid majorities in both chambers and been signed into law. The problem was not polarization; it was disorganization. A latent majority could not muster and assert itself.

As soon became apparent, Boehner’s 2011 debacle was not a glitch but part of an emerging pattern. Two years later, the House’s conservative faction shut down the government with the connivance of Ted Cruz, the very last thing most Republicans wanted to happen. When Boehner was asked by Jay Leno why he had permitted what the speaker himself called a “very predictable disaster,” he replied, rather poignantly: “When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”

Boehner was right. Washington doesn’t have a crisis of leadership; it has a crisis of followership. One can argue about particulars, and Congress does better on some occasions than on others. Overall, though, minority factions and veto groups are becoming ever more dominant on Capitol Hill as leaders watch their organizational capacity dribble away. Helpless to do much more than beg for support, and hostage to his own party’s far right, an exhausted Boehner finally gave up and quit last year. Almost immediately, his heir apparent, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, was shot to pieces too. No wonder Paul Ryan, in his first act as speaker, remonstrated with his own colleagues against chaos.

Nevertheless, by spring the new speaker was bogged down. “Almost six months into the job, Ryan and his top lieutenants face questions about whether the Wisconsin Republican’s tenure atop the House is any more effective than his predecessor,” Politico ’s Web site reported in April. The House Republican Conference, an unnamed Republican told Politico , is “unwhippable and unleadable. Ryan is as talented as you can be: There’s nobody better. But even he can’t do anything. Who could?”

Of course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich described the cycle this way: The people, he said, “want change, and they keep putting outsiders in to bring about the change. Then the change doesn’t come … because we’re putting people in that don’t understand compromise.” Disruption in politics and dysfunction in government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal.

Being a disorder of the immune system, chaos syndrome magnifies other problems, turning political head colds into pneumonia. Take polarization. Over the past few decades, the public has become sharply divided across partisan and ideological lines. Chaos syndrome compounds the problem, because even when Republicans and Democrats do find something to work together on, the threat of an extremist primary challenge funded by a flood of outside money makes them think twice—or not at all. Opportunities to make bipartisan legislative advances slip away.

Or take the new technologies that are revolutionizing the media. Today, a figure like Trump can reach millions through Twitter without needing to pass network‑TV gatekeepers or spend a dime. A figure like Sanders can use the Internet to reach millions of donors without recourse to traditional fund-raising sources. Outside groups, friendly and unfriendly alike, can drown out political candidates in their own races. (As a frustrated Cruz told a supporter about outside groups ostensibly backing his presidential campaign, “I’m left to just hope that what they say bears some resemblance to what I actually believe.”) Disruptive media technologies are nothing new in American politics; they have arisen periodically since the early 19th century, as the historian Jill Lepore noted in a February article in The New Yorker . What is new is the system’s difficulty in coping with them. Disintermediating technologies bring fresh voices into the fray, but they also bring atomization and cacophony. To organize coherent plays amid swarms of attack ads, middlemen need to be able to coordinate the fund-raising and messaging of candidates and parties and activists—which is what they are increasingly hard-pressed to do.

Assembling power to govern a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly divided democracy is inevitably hard. Chaos syndrome makes it all the harder. For Democrats, the disorder is merely chronic; for the Republican Party, it is acute. Finding no precedent for what he called Trump’s hijacking of an entire political party, Jon Meacham went so far as to tell Joe Scarborough in The Washington Post that George W. Bush might prove to be the last Republican president.

Nearly everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected.

Prognosis and Treatment

Chaos syndrome as a psychiatric disorder.

I don’t have a quick solution to the current mess, but I do think it would be easy, in principle, to start moving in a better direction. Although returning parties and middlemen to anything like their 19th-century glory is not conceivable—or, in today’s America, even desirable—strengthening parties and middlemen is very doable. Restrictions inhibiting the parties from coordinating with their own candidates serve to encourage political wildcatting, so repeal them. Limits on donations to the parties drive money to unaccountable outsiders, so lift them. Restoring the earmarks that help grease legislative success requires nothing more than a change in congressional rules. And there are all kinds of ways the parties could move insiders back to the center of the nomination process. If they wanted to, they could require would-be candidates to get petition signatures from elected officials and county party chairs, or they could send unbound delegates to their conventions (as several state parties are doing this year), or they could enhance the role of middlemen in a host of other ways.

Building party machines and political networks is what career politicians naturally do, if they’re allowed to do it. So let them. I’m not talking about rigging the system to exclude challengers or prevent insurgencies. I’m talking about de- rigging the system to reduce its pervasive bias against middlemen. Then they can do their job, thereby making the world safe for challengers and insurgencies.

Unfortunately, although the mechanics of de-rigging are fairly straightforward, the politics of it are hard. The public is wedded to an anti-establishment narrative. The political-reform community is invested in direct participation, transparency, fund-raising limits on parties, and other elements of the anti-intermediation worldview. The establishment, to the extent that there still is such a thing, is demoralized and shattered, barely able to muster an argument for its own existence.

But there are optimistic signs, too. Liberals in the campaign-finance-reform community are showing new interest in strengthening the parties. Academics and commentators are getting a good look at politics without effective organizers and cohesive organizations, and they are terrified. On Capitol Hill, conservatives and liberals alike are on board with restoring regular order in Congress. In Washington, insiders have had some success at reorganizing and pushing back. No Senate Republican was defeated by a primary challenger in 2014, in part because then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a machine politician par excellence, created a network of business allies to counterpunch against the Tea Party.

The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics. Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry. Because that problem is mental, not mechanical, it really is hard to remedy.

In March, a Trump supporter told The New York Times , “I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party.” Another said, “We know who Donald Trump is, and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.” That kind of anti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.

25 Essay Topics for American Government Classes

Writing Ideas That Will Make Students Think

• Teaching Resources
• An Introduction to Teaching
• Tips & Strategies
• Policies & Discipline
• Community Involvement
• School Administration
• Technology in the Classroom
• Teaching Adult Learners
• Issues In Education
• Becoming A Teacher
• Assessments & Tests
• Elementary Education
• Secondary Education
• Special Education
• Homeschooling
• M.Ed., Curriculum and Instruction, University of Florida
• B.A., History, University of Florida

If you are a teacher searching for essay topics to assign to your U.S. government or civics class or looking for ideas, do not fret. It is easy to integrate debates and discussions into the classroom environment. These topic suggestions provide a wealth of ideas for written assignments such as  position papers , compare-and-contrast essays , and  argumentative essays . Scan the following 25 question topics and ideas to find just the right one. You'll soon be reading interesting papers from your students after they grapple with these challenging and important issues.

• Compare and contrast what is a direct democracy versus representative democracy. 
• React to the following statement: Democratic decision-making should be extended to all areas of life including schools, the workplace, and the government. 
• Compare and contrast the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Explain how these led to the Great Compromise .
• Pick one thing about the U.S. Constitution including its amendments that you think should be changed. What modifications would you make? Explain your reasons for making this change.
• What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants?" Do you think that this statement still applies to today's world? 
• Compare and contrast mandates and conditions of aid regarding the federal government's relationship with states. For example, how has the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered support to states and commonwealths that have experienced natural disasters?
• Should individual states have more or less power compared to the federal government when implementing laws dealing with topics such as the legalization of marijuana  and abortion ? 
• Outline a program that would get more people to vote in presidential elections or local elections.
• What are the dangers of gerrymandering when it comes to voting and presidential elections?
• Compare and contrast the major political parties in the United States. What policies are they preparing for upcoming elections?
• Why would voters choose to vote for a third party, even though they know that their candidate has virtually no chance of winning? 
• Describe the major sources of money that are donated to political campaigns. Check out the Federal Election Regulatory Commission's website for information.
• Should corporations be treated as individuals regarding being allowed to donate to political campaigns?  Look at the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling on the issue. Defend your answer. 
• Explain the role of social media in connecting interest groups that have grown stronger as the major political parties have grown weaker. 
• Explain why the media has been called the fourth branch of government. Include your opinion on whether this is an accurate portrayal.
• Compare and contrast the campaigns of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives candidates.
• Should term limits be instituted for members of Congress? Explain your answer.
• Should members of Congress vote their conscience or follow the will of the people who elected them into office? Explain your answer.
• Explain how executive orders have been used by presidents throughout the history of the U.S. What is the number of executive orders issued by the current president?
• In your opinion, which of the three branches of the federal government has the most power? Defend your answer.
• Which of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment do you consider the most important? Explain your answer. 
• Should a school be required to get a warrant before searching a student's property? Defend your answer. 
• Why did the Equal Rights Amendment fail? What kind of campaign could be run to see it passed?
• Explain how the 14th Amendment has affected civil liberties in the United States from the time of its passage at the end of the Civil War.
• Do you think that the federal government has enough, too much or just the right amount of power? Defend your answer.
• 50 Argumentative Essay Topics
• 100 Persuasive Essay Topics
• January Writing Prompts
• Key Election Terms for Students
• Voting Rights Background for Students
• Presidential Elections: ESL Lesson
• 501 Topic Suggestions for Writing Essays and Speeches
• Expository Essay Genre With Suggested Prompts
• Current Political Campaign Contribution Limits
• American Government Journal Topics
• Campaign Finance Laws: Definition and Examples
• 12 Interesting Ethical Topics for Essay Papers
• What Is Political Participation? Definition and Examples
• Fun March Writing Prompts for Journaling
• The Important Role of US Third Parties
• Why Puerto Rico Matters in the US Presidential Election

The Impact of the 26th Amendment on American Democracy

This essay about the 26th Amendment explores its significant impact on American democracy by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. It discusses the origins of the amendment, its immediate effects on the electoral landscape, the increase in youth political activism, and its broader implications for civil rights and inclusivity. The essay also examines challenges in youth voter turnout and the amendment’s lasting influence on policy-making and societal perceptions of young people.

How it works

The ratification of the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 1, 1971, signified a transformative moment in the trajectory of American democracy. This amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, fundamentally altered the nation’s political dynamics. Its implications for American democracy are extensive, affecting electoral processes, civic engagement, and the broader conversation on civil rights and inclusivity.

The origins of the 26th Amendment are rooted in the turbulent socio-political climate of the 1960s and early 1970s. This era was marked by vigorous civil rights movements, widespread anti-war demonstrations, and a burgeoning call for youth involvement in the political sphere.

A persuasive argument for lowering the voting age emerged in the phrase, “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” This highlighted the paradox of 18-year-olds being eligible for military draft during the Vietnam War without the corresponding right to vote. Energized by this cause, student activists, civil rights advocates, and supportive politicians rallied together, leading to the rapid adoption of the amendment.

The immediate consequence of the 26th Amendment was the enfranchisement of millions of young Americans, significantly impacting the electoral landscape. Politicians and political parties had to adjust their approaches to engage this new voter base, which brought fresh perspectives and priorities into the political sphere. The inclusion of younger voters broadened the scope of public discourse to include issues such as education, environmental sustainability, and social justice, which had previously been underrepresented.

Additionally, the 26th Amendment ignited a surge of political activism among the youth. The new voting rights empowered young people to influence policy decisions and hold their representatives accountable. This empowerment fostered a more participatory democratic culture and encouraged the creation of youth-centric political organizations and advocacy groups, which played a crucial role in mobilizing and maintaining youth engagement in politics.

The amendment also significantly impacted the broader civil rights movement, underscoring the idea that age, like race and gender, should not impede full democratic participation. This extension of voting rights was part of a broader trend towards greater inclusivity and equality, reinforcing the concept that democracy is strengthened by the active involvement of all citizens. By lowering the voting age, the 26th Amendment contributed to the reduction of discriminatory practices and set a precedent for future efforts to expand democratic participation.

However, the impact of the 26th Amendment has been mixed. While it enfranchised millions of young voters, their turnout rates have historically been lower than those of older age groups. This discrepancy raises concerns about the amendment’s effectiveness in realizing its full potential. Various factors contribute to this low turnout, including political disillusionment, lack of awareness about the voting process, and obstacles like stringent voter ID laws and complex registration requirements.

Overcoming these challenges necessitates a dedicated effort to educate and engage young voters. Comprehensive civic education programs that emphasize the importance of voting and provide practical information about the electoral process are essential. Additionally, reforms aimed at making voting more accessible, such as same-day registration and expanded early voting, can help increase youth turnout. Encouragingly, recent elections have seen a resurgence in youth participation, driven by social media campaigns and grassroots organizing.

A crucial aspect of the 26th Amendment’s impact is its influence on policy-making. The inclusion of younger voters has compelled politicians to address issues particularly relevant to this demographic. For instance, policies related to higher education funding, student loan debt, climate change, and digital privacy have gained prominence in political discussions. This shift ensures that the concerns of young people are reflected in legislative agendas, leading to more comprehensive and representative governance.

Furthermore, the 26th Amendment has had a lasting effect on societal perceptions of young people. By acknowledging their right to vote, it affirmed their status as full citizens with a stake in the country’s future. This recognition has fostered a greater sense of responsibility and civic duty among young people, encouraging them to contribute to their communities in various ways beyond voting. From volunteering and community organizing to running for public office, young Americans have increasingly embraced their role as active participants in the democratic process.

In conclusion, the 26th Amendment has had a profound and enduring impact on American democracy. By lowering the voting age to 18, it expanded the electorate, invigorated political engagement, and reinforced the principles of equality and inclusivity. While challenges remain in ensuring high turnout among young voters, the amendment has undeniably reshaped the political landscape, bringing new issues to the forefront and fostering a more participatory democratic culture. As the United States continues to evolve, the legacy of the 26th Amendment stands as a testament to the power of inclusive voting rights and the importance of empowering all citizens to shape their nation’s future.

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Guest Essay

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

By Steven Hahn

Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”

In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” Mr. Trump told Time, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Further evidence, it seems, of Mr. Trump’s efforts to construct a political world like no other in American history. But how unprecedented is it, really? That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.

Many of us have not wanted to see it that way. “This is not who we are as a nation,” one journalist exclaimed in what was a common response to the violence on Jan. 6, “and we must not let ourselves or others believe otherwise.” Mr. Biden has said much the same thing.

While it’s true that Mr. Trump was the first president to lose an election and attempt to stay in power, observers have come to recognize the need for a lengthier view of Trumpism. Even so, they are prone to imagining that there was a time not all that long ago when political “normalcy” prevailed. What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view.

Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.

A few examples may be illustrative. Although European colonization of North America has often been imagined as a sharp break from the ways of home countries, neo-feudal dreams inspired the making of Euro-American societies from the Carolinas up through the Hudson Valley, based as they were on landed estates and coerced labor, while the Puritan towns of New England, with their own hierarchies, demanded submission to the faith and harshly policed their members and potential intruders alike. The backcountry began to fill up with land-hungry settlers who generally formed ethnicity-based enclaves, eyed outsiders with suspicion and, with rare exceptions, hoped to rid their territory of Native peoples. Most of those who arrived in North America between the early 17th century and the time of the American Revolution were either enslaved or in servitude, and master-servant jurisprudence shaped labor relations well after slavery was abolished, a phenomenon that has been described as “belated feudalism.”

The anti-colonialism of the American Revolution was accompanied not only by warfare against Native peoples and rewards for enslavers, but also by a deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism, and hostility to Catholics remained a potent political force well into the 20th century. Monarchist solutions were bruited about during the writing of the Constitution and the first decade of the American Republic: John Adams thought that the country would move in such a direction and other leaders at the time, including Washington, Madison and Hamilton, wondered privately if a king would be necessary in the event a “republican remedy” failed.

The 1830s, commonly seen as the height of Jacksonian democracy, were racked by violent expulsions of Catholics , Mormons and abolitionists of both races, along with thousands of Native peoples dispossessed of their homelands and sent to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

The new democratic politics of the time was often marked by Election Day violence after campaigns suffused with military cadences, while elected officials usually required the support of elite patrons to guarantee the bonds they had to post. Even in state legislatures and Congress, weapons could be brandished and duels arranged; “bullies” enforced the wills of their allies.

When enslavers in the Southern states resorted to secession rather than risk their system under a Lincoln administration, they made clear that their Confederacy was built on the cornerstone of slavery and white supremacy. And although their crushing defeat brought abolition, the establishment of birthright citizenship (except for Native peoples), the political exclusion of Confederates, and the extension of voting rights to Black men — the results of one of the world’s great revolutions — it was not long before the revolution went into reverse.

The federal government soon allowed former Confederates and their white supporters to return to power, destroy Black political activism and, accompanied by lynchings (expressing the “will” of white communities), build the edifice of Jim Crow: segregation, political disfranchisement and a harsh labor regime. Already previewed in the pre-Civil War North, Jim Crow received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court and the administration of Woodrow Wilson .

Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.

The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

Most worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan, energized by anti-Catholicism and antisemitism as well as anti-Black racism, marched brazenly in cities great and small. The Klan became a mass movement and wielded significant political power; it was crucial, for example , to the enforcement of Prohibition. Once the organization unraveled in the late 1920s, many Klansmen and women found their way to new fascist groups and the radical right more generally.

Sidelined by the Great Depression and New Deal, the illiberal right regained traction in the late 1930s, and during the 1950s won grass-roots support through vehement anti-Communism and opposition to the civil rights movement. As early as 1964, in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama began to hone a rhetoric of white grievance and racial hostility that had appeal in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic, and Barry Goldwater’s campaign that year, despite its failure, put winds in the sails of the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom.

Four years later, Wallace mobilized enough support as a third-party candidate to win five states. And in 1972, once again as a Democrat, Wallace racked up primary wins in both the North and the South before an assassination attempt forced him out of the race. Growing backlashes against school desegregation and feminism added further fuel to the fire on the right, paving the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, the neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke had won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature and nearly three-fifths of the white vote in campaigns for governor and senator. Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, called for “America First,” the fortification of the border (a “Buchanan fence”), and a culture war for the “soul” of America, while the National Rifle Association became a powerful force on the right and in the Republican Party.

When Mr. Trump questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president, a project that quickly became known as “birtherism,” he made use of a Reconstruction-era racist trope that rejected the legitimacy of Black political rights and power. In so doing, Mr. Trump began to cement a coalition of aggrieved white voters. They were ready to push back against the nation’s growing cultural diversity — embodied by Mr. Obama — and the challenges they saw to traditional hierarchies of family, gender and race. They had much on which to build.

Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “ Illiberal America: a History .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

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Trump start

Fear of uncontrolled immigration is upsetting the political landscape in the run-up to the presidential election.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE

At a rally in December, former president Donald Trump went as far as to say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

TURN ON SOUND

Americans’ mistrust of new immigrants is hardly new. In fact, it exhibits a striking resemblance to the prevailing fears 100 years ago.

The country might soon need to “station a soldier every hundred yards on our borders to keep out the hordes,” argued an article in Wisconsin in April of 1924.

Treating Japan in the same way as “ white nations, ” an Illinois newspaper cautioned in May of 1924, could allow Japanese immigrants to own land and seek the “ rights given white immigrants. ”

“ America, ” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “ a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race. ”

How America tried and failed to stay White

100 years ago the u.s. tried to limit immigration to white europeans. instead, diversity triumphed., “i think that we have sufficient stock in america now for us to shut the door.”.

That sounds like Donald Trump, right? Maybe on one of his campaign stops? It certainly fits the mood of the country. This year, immigration became voters’ “ most important problem ” in Gallup polling for the first time since Central Americans flocked to the border in 2019. More than half of Americans perceive immigrants crossing the border illegally as a “ critical threat .”

Yet the sentiment expressed above is almost exactly 100 years old. It was uttered by Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith , a South Carolina Democrat, on April 9, 1924. And it helped set the stage for a historic change in U.S. immigration law, which imposed strict national quotas for newcomers that would shape the United States’ ethnic makeup for decades to come.

Immigration was perceived as a problem a century ago, too. Large numbers of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flocked to the United States during the first two decades of the 20th century, sparking a public outcry over unfamiliar intruders who lacked the Northern and Western European blood of previous migrant cohorts.

On May 15, 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , which would constrain immigration into the United States to preserve, in Smith’s words, America’s “pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.”

“It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries,” Smith continued , speaking of America not 40 years after the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York harbor, with its open arms for all humankind. Immigration, Smith noted, should be shaped “to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power.”

The act set the rules of who’s in and who’s out. Here is what happened:

In the 1800s, most immigrants arriving in the United States came from Western and Northern Europe . By the early 1900s, that flow changed to Eastern and Southern European countries , such as Italy, Russia and Hungary.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established narrow national quotas. Immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe was slashed to a trickle.

Western and Northern European countries such as Germany, Britain and Ireland were given the largest allowances.

The act did not set quotas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Mexico, and countries in the Caribbean and South America .

The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 undid the national quotas, and immigration surged afterward.

Despite continued attempts to preserve the nation’s White European identity, immigrants today come from a diverse range of nations, mostly in the Global South.

Fast forward 100 years and the United States no longer has quotas. But it still has not landed on an immigration policy it can live with. Trump asks why the United States can’t take in immigrants only from “ nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland ,” instead of “countries that are a disaster.” President Biden, who not even four years ago wanted to grant citizenship to millions of unauthorized immigrants, today wants to “ shut down the border right now .”

All the while, desperate immigrants from around the world keep fleeing poverty, repression and violence, launching themselves into the most perilous journey of their lives to reach the United States.

The public conversation over immigration that has raged at least since the days of the 1924 Johnson-Reed law can explain Washington’s policy failure: There is no way America can reconcile the sentiments embodied by the Statue of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. — with its deep-seated fear that immigrants will reshape its ethnic makeup, its identity and the balance of political power.

Try as they might, policymakers have always been unable to protect the White America they wanted to preserve. Today’s “melting pot” was built largely with policies that didn’t work. Millions upon millions of migrants have overcome what obstacles the United States has tried to put in their way.

Israel Zangwill’s play “The Melting Pot” — which opened at the Columbia Theatre in D.C. on Oct. 5, 1908 — has a narrow understanding of diversity by current standards. The play was an ersatz “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring a Jewish Russian immigrant and a Christian Russian immigrant. But it carried a lofty message. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians — into the crucible with you all!” trumpets David Quixano, the main character. “God is making the American.”

Americans, however, were already uncomfortable with that fluid sense of identity. In 1910, two years after the debut of Zangwill’s play, geneticist Charles Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. It provided the intellectual grounding for America’s increasingly overt xenophobia.

In “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” Davenport wrote that Italians had a “tendency to crimes of personal violence,” that Jews were prone to “intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest,” and that letting more of them in would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial,” as well as “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.”

Harry Laughlin, another Cold Spring Harbor researcher, told members of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in 1922 that these new immigrants brought “inferior mental and social qualities” that couldn’t be expected “to raise above, or even to approximate,” those of Americans descended from earlier, Northern and Western European stock.

The Johnson-Reed Act wasn’t the first piece of legislation to protect the bloodstream from the outside world. That would have been the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which kept Chinese migrants out for six decades. In general, though, immigration law before World War I excluded people based on income and education, as well as physical and moral qualities — not on ethnicity and its proxy, nation of origin.

In 1907, “imbeciles, feeble minded persons, unaccompanied children under 17 years of age” and those “mentally or physically defective” were put on the excluded list, alongside women coming for “prostitution or for any other immoral purpose.” The Immigration Act of 1917 tried to limit immigration to the literate.

But the large number of migrants arriving from Eastern and Southern Europe since the turn of the 20th century refocused the national debate. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission , which would reach for arguments from eugenics to recommend choosing migrants to maintain existing American bloodlines via “the limitation of the number of each race arriving each year” to a percentage of those living in the United States years before. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 did just that, establishing the first specific national quotas.

In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act completed the project, reshaping the nation’s identity over the next four decades. It set an overall ceiling of 165,000 immigrants per year, about 20 percent of the average before World War I, carefully allotting quotas for preferred bloodstreams. Japanese people were completely excluded , as were Chinese people. Elsewhere, the act established national quotas equivalent to 2 percent of citizens from each country recorded in the 1890 U.S. census. Germans received 51,227 slots; Greeks just 100. Nearly 160,000 Italians had entered the United States every year in the first two decades of the century. Their quota was set at less than 4,000.

And, so, the melting pot was purified — and emptied: Two years after the Johnson-Reed Act, sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild published “The Melting Pot Mistake,” a reiteration of the racial logic that undergirded all the new restrictions. By 1970, immigrants made up less than 5 percent of the population, down from nearly 15 percent in 1910.

There can be “no doubt that if America is to remain a stable nation it must continue to be a white man’s country for an indefinite period to come,” Fairchild wrote . “An exclusion policy toward all non-white groups is wholly defensible in theory and practice, however questionable may have been the immediate means by which this policy has been put into effect at successive periods in our history.”

And yet perhaps the most important lesson to flow from this moment is that the levee didn’t hold. Today, immigrants are back at 14 percent of the population. And despite the repeated efforts over the decades to preserve the ethnic purity proposed in Johnson-Reed, the pot filled up with undesirables again. Migrants from Europe accounted for three-quarters of the foreign born in 1960, but only 10 percent in 2022 .

The Statue of Liberty is arguably the nation’s most prominent symbol, representing America as a land of opportunity and refuge. But the nation’s tolerance of outsiders has mostly been shaped by baser instincts, a tug of war between the hunger for foreign labor to feed a galloping economy and the fear of how the newcomers might change what it means to be American.

Immigration restrictions relax when the immigrant population is comparatively small and jobs plentiful, and they tighten when the foreign footprint increases and jobs get relatively scarce. Muzzafar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute points out that even recent migrants turn against newer cohorts, fearful that they may take their jobs and transform their communities.

Fifteen percent, Mr. Chishti suggests, might be the tipping point when the uneasy equilibrium tips decidedly against newcomers. Foreign-born people amounted to about 15 percent of the population when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and again when the Johnson-Reed Act was signed into law.

Restrictive immigration laws

were passed after the foreign-born

population reached 15 percent.

Share of the population born outside the United States

Celler Act,

Ultimately, policies

meant to preserve

a White America failed.

Share of the population that is not White

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American

Community Survey data through IPMUS

Restrictive immigration laws were passed

after the foreign-born population

reached 15 percent.

Ultimately, policies meant to preserve

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey

data through IPMUS

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data through IPMUS

39% in 2022

15% in 2022

In the 1960s, when the foreign-born share was dropping to about 5 percent of the population, however, other considerations became more important. In 1965, the quotas established four decades earlier were finally disowned.

Their demise was, in part, a barefaced attempt to woo the politically influential voting bloc of Italian Americans, who had a hard time bringing their relatives to the United States under the 1924 limits. There was a foreign policy motivation, too: The quotas arguably undermined the international position of the United States, emerging then as a leader of the postwar order in a decolonizing world.

The story Americans most like to hear is that the end of the quotas was a natural outcome of the civil rights movement, in tension with the race-based preferences implicit in the immigration law. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1964. “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”

But the most interesting aspect of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which did away with the quotas, lies in what it did not try to change. Though the new immigration law removed quotas by nationality, it did not abandon the project of protecting the predominant European bloodstream from inferior new strains. It just changed the instrument: It replaced national quotas with family ties .

Rep. Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat who chaired the House subcommittee on immigration, ditched the original idea of replacing the nationality quotas with preferences for immigrants with valuable skills. In their place, he wrote in preferences for the family members of current residents, which ensured new arrivals remained European and White.

It was paramount to preserve America as it was. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who managed passage of Hart-Celler through the Senate, promised his fellow Americans that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” President Lyndon B. Johnson claimed on Oct. 3, 1965, as he signed the Hart-Celler Act into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

That didn’t quite work out as planned. Migrants allowed in under Hart-Celler have ushered in an America that looks very different from the one Johnson addressed. Half of the foreign born today come from Latin America; about 3 in 10 from Asia. Fewer than 6 in 10 Americans today are White and not of Hispanic origin, down from nearly 9 in 10 in 1965. Hispanics account for about one-fifth of the population. African Americans make up nearly 14 percent; Asian Americans just over 6 percent.

Share of the population that

is not White or is Hispanic

Race-specific population includes Hispanics.

Other non-white

Native American

Multiple races

W hite Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community

Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019,

the most recent comparable numbers.

White Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey

through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

comparable numbers.

Share of the population that is

not White or is Hispanic

Source: U.S. Census and American Community Survey through IPUMS. Data through 2019, the most recent

And some of the old arguments are back. In 2017, the Harvard economist George J. Borjas published a tome about foreigners’ impact on the United States, in which he updated the debate over migrant quality to the post-1965 era: Newer cohorts, mostly from Latin America and other countries in the Global South were, he said, worse than earlier migrants of European stock. “Imagine that immigrants do carry some baggage with them,” he wrote. “That baggage, when unloaded in the new environment, dilutes some of the North’s productive edge.”

That the Hart-Celler law did, in fact, drastically change the nature of the United States is arguably the single most powerful reason that U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn. But even as arguments from eugenics are getting a new moment in the sun to justify new rounds of draconian immigration restrictions, the six decades since 1965 suggest the project to preserve a White European America has already lost.

What went wrong? Much of Europe got rich, and this dramatically reduced its citizens’ incentive to move to the United States. Instead, immigrants from poorer reaches of the planet — from Asia but predominantly from Latin America — took the opportunity to invite their relatives into the land of opportunity.

As usual, the U.S. economy’s appetite for foreign labor played a large role. Mexicans, like people from across the Americas, had been mostly ignored by immigration law. They were not subject to the 1924 quotas, perhaps because there weren’t that many of them coming into the United States or, perhaps, because their labor was needed in the Southwest — especially during the world wars.

Mexicans suffered periodic backlashes, such as when the Hoover administration figured that kicking out millions of Mexicans and Mexican-looking Americans was a smart political move in response to the Great Depression, or when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched “ Operation Wetback ,” a mass deportation effort created ostensibly to raise wages in the South.

In any event, the first quota for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere as a whole came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, the story of immigration after that was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the zeitgeist again took to worrying about the pollution of the American spirit. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted that “the persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.”

And still, the U.S. political system proved powerless to stem the tide. U.S. economic interests — and the draw they exerted on immigrants from Mexico and other unstable economies south of the border — overpowered the ancestral fears.

The last major shot at immigration reform passed in Congress, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 , was based on a supposed grand bargain, which included offering legal status to several million unauthorized immigrants, bigger guest-worker programs to sate employers’ demands for labor and a clampdown on illegal work that came with a penalty on employers who hired unauthorized workers.

Employers, of course, quickly found a workaround. Unauthorized migration from Mexico surged, and the mass legalization opened the door to family-based chain migration on a large scale, as millions of newly legalized Mexican immigrants brought their family members into the country. In 1980, there were 2.2 million Mexican immigrants in the United States. By 2022, there were 11 million .

Migration today, again, has taken a new turn. Migrants are no longer mostly single Mexicans crossing the border surreptitiously to melt into the U.S. labor force. They are families, and they come from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Ecuador, China and India. Mexicans accounted for fewer than a quarter of migrant encounters with U.S. agents along the border in the first half of fiscal 2024.

The most explosive difference is that immigration today is much more visible than it has possibly ever been. Immigrants don’t try to squeeze across the border undetected. They cross it without permission, turn themselves in and ask for asylum, overwhelming immigration courts and perpetuating the image of a border out of control.

Americans’ sense of threat might have more to do with the chaos at the border than with immigration itself. Still, the sense of foreboding draws from that same old well of fear. That fear is today arguably more acute than when ethnic quotas were written into U.S. immigration law in 1924. Because today, the White, Anglo-Saxon Americans who believe this nation to be their birthright are truly under demographic siege.

Twenty years from now, White, non-Hispanic Americans will slip below 50 percent of the population and become just another, albeit big, minority. For Trump’s electoral base of older, White rural voters, the prospect of non-Whites acquiring power to challenge their status as embodiments of American identity amounts to an existential menace that may justify radical action.

Immigration has re-engineered U.S. politics. Non-White voters account for some 40 percent of Democrats . Eighty-one percent of Republican voters, by contrast, are both White and not Hispanic. The nation’s polarized politics have become, in some nontrivial sense, a proxy for a conflict between different interpretations of what it means to be American.

The renewed backlash against immigration has little to offer the American project, though. Closing the door to new Americans would be hardly desirable, a blow to one of the nation’s greatest sources of dynamism. Raw data confirms how immigrants are adding to the nation’s economic growth , even while helping keep a lid on inflation .

Anyway, that horse left the stable. The United States is full of immigrants from, in Trump’s memorable words, “s---hole countries.” The project to set this in reverse is a fool’s errand. The 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration law might have succeeded in curtailing immigration. But the restrictions did not hold. From Presidents Johnson to Trump, efforts to circle the wagons around some ancestral White American identity failed.

We are extremely lucky it did. Contra Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith’s 100-year old prescriptions, the nation owes what greatness it has to the many different women and men it has drawn from around the world to build their futures. This requires a different conversation — one that doesn’t feature mass expulsions and concentration camps but focuses on constructing a new shared American identity that fits everyone, including the many more immigrants who will arrive from the Global South for years to come.

Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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460 Excellent Political Topics to Write about in 2024

If you have an assignment in politics, look no further—this article will help you ace your paper. Here, you will find a list of unique political topics to write about compiled by our custom writing team .

But that’s not all of it! Keep reading if you want to:

• See how to tackle political essay topics in your paper;
• Choose a topic that will be interesting for you to research;
• Refresh your knowledge of essential political concepts.

Now, without further ado, let’s get started! Below, you’ll find political topics and questions for your task.

• 🔝 Top 10 Topics
• ✅ Main Political Concepts
• 🇺🇸 American Politics Topics
• 🌐 Global Politics
• 📚 Political Science
• 🏛️ Political Philosophy
• ⚖️ Comparative Politics
• 💵 Political Economy
• 🍴 Food Politics
• 🌱 Environmental Politics
• 📖 Political Case Study Topics
• ✍️ How to Write a Political Essay

🔍 References

🔝 top 10 political topics to write about.

• The political causes of terrorism
• Why do we need political parties?
• Is politics connected to religion?
• Does an ideal political system exist?
• How to prevent ideological conflicts
• Electoral systems around the world
• The role of the UN in the world politics
• Should nuclear weapons be banned?
• The importance of international relations
• Should the government control the internet?

✅ Main Political Concepts to Focus On

Politics is an exciting and versatile subject. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not confined to senates and debate chambers. It also takes place on the streets and in your home. You can even say that everything is political.

Politics has so many areas to study—it may be hard to decide what to choose. Let’s see what interesting concepts you can focus on:

• Government and all that concerns the state. It includes actions that involve state institutions and people serving them. You might want to concentrate on voting, transnational interactions, or acts of politicians.
• We’ve all heard that conflict is a healthy part of every relationship. Do you believe that politics should embrace the differences? Then you may want to study the mechanisms of protests and revolutions.
• Or, you can focus on methods of nonviolent conflict resolution .
• Execution of power . Here the question is: what is power? Study various definitions and choose the ones you like best.
• Maybe you consider politics a social activity . You can also think of it as more of a public activity . Look into these concepts and see where politics takes place.

Does any of these ideas seem particularly interesting to you? Write an essay about it! Or, if you want inspiration, check our extensive list of ideas covering every major branch of politics. Below you will find current political topics as well as historical ones.

🇺🇸 American Politics Essay Topics

Inner social and economic tensions have led to drastic changes in America’s political climate. The divide between Democrats and Republicans grows more resonant by the minute. What is your opinion on these developments? Have a closer look at it with one of our engaging topics:

• Discuss gun control measures and crime rates reduction in the US. 
• Analyze Kanye West’s presidential campaign.
• What are the crucial current issues to voters in America? 
• Do national politics in the USA neglect older adults?
• Why isn’t the right to privacy listed in the US constitution?
• The American government has extensive plans concerning the closure of Purdue Pharma. But are they acting in the public’s best interest? 
• Pros and cons of raising the number of justices at the Supreme Court. 
• Write about American neutrality and contribution in the Great War. 
• Discuss the pros and cons of building a fortified border wall between the USA and Mexico. 
• What would happen to California if it became an independent country?
• Who should pay for essential healthcare services in America? 
• Does the two-party-system do more harm than good?

• What did President Trump achieve by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord? 
• Describe how the American states collaborate in the federal system .
• Is a cap on immigration to the US necessary? 
• How does wealth inadequacy affect American democracy?
• The role of freedom in American politics. 
• How does the Electoral College work? 
• What are the implications of Donald Trump’s revealed tax statements? 
• Political impact of the body positivity movement in America.
• The BLM movement as covered by Fox News vs. CNN. 
• The US-Australian cooperation and its implications. 
• Should the US seek tighter bonds with China? 
• What’s the easiest way to become politically involved in the US?
• Why should you join a political party?
• Effects of the war on drugs. 
• Debate implementing more restrictive gun laws nationwide. 
• America’s role in restoring Europe after World War II. 
• How does social media influence political decisions in America?
• Is capitalism the best system for the US?
• Why don’t LGBT people in America have the same rights as straight people? 
• How did the legalization of dispensaries in California impact consumer behavior ?
• What branches does the American government consist of? 
• How is poverty affecting rural communities in the US?
• Explore law enforcement in the US on local, state, and federal levels.
• Discuss the limits of executive power in New Jersey.
• Should Oregon implement a cap on the price of medicines? 
• What caused healthcare in America to become so expensive? 
• Religious extremism in the US after 9/11. 
• Your position on the American intervention in Syria. 
• What caused many people to lose trust in President Trump’s government?
• Describe the state of affairs that allowed Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. 
• What laws restrict campaign financing in Florida?
• Discuss the budgeting of the US Environmental Protection Agency. 
• Evaluate President Trump’s crisis response.
• Outline the ideas of American politicians from parties on the margin.
• The importance of the Hispanic vote.
• The Patriot Act: facts and controversies. 
• How do stereotypes towards Asian Americans influence their opportunities? 
• The power of line-item vetoes in Wisconsin.

🌐 Global Political Topics to Talk About

Global politics studies basic political ideas on an international scale. This subject combines multiple social sciences to analyze political activity worldwide. Choose between the topics concerning human rights, development, conflict, and international relations.

• Why did Reporters without Borders build a library in Minecraft?
• How influential are NGOs?
• What are the main functions of the UN? 
• Discuss how the 2015 migrant crisis affected European politics.
• What are the drawbacks of being stateless ?
• African socialism in the 1950s and 1960s. 
• Has the US become estranged from its European allies?
• What is the Human Development Index?
• Explain the three waves of democratization .
• Why do some countries suffer from terrorism more than others?
• Discuss methods of conflict resolution used by the African Union.
• At what point does a crisis justify international intervention?
• Trace the events of the 2020 election in Belarus. 
• What caused the Eastern Mediterranean to be war-torn?
• Discuss the role of gender in modern Africa. 
• How did the California Gold Rush in 1848 impact global politics?
• The development of Latin American cities in the past 30 years. 
• Why was Germany hesitant to participate in colonization? What led to the change of heart?
• Israeli-Palestine conflict and the global community.
• How do countries reconcile after being at war with each other?
• What is the Spratly Islands dispute?
• Why does China claim ownership of the South China Sea? What makes it a globally important issue?
• The threats of transnational organized crime. 
• What are the effects of Brexit on the UK and international relations?
• How does a country’s geography shape its politics?
• US foreign policy: criticism and problems. 
• The purpose and importance of global health. 
• Discuss how Sub-Saharan Africa can become independent of foreign aid. 
• Global citizenship: characteristics and responsibilities. 
• How does feminism influence global relations? 
• What does deterrence theory entail?
• Explain how the International Court of Justice works.
• Global war in terrorism: what are its main challenges? 
• What causes interdependence between nations?
• Why do states need to be internationally acknowledged? What happens if they aren’t?
• Structural effects of uneven resource distribution.
• Gender bias in global politics. 
• Explore the history of Cambodian politics.
• Kazakhstan: the proposal to switch the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin. 
• What factors determine if a country is safe to travel to?
• Discuss Daniel Drezner’s theories of global politics.
• The development of the UK’s global political influence.
• Compare how various countries protect their indigenous cultures. 
• Should the EU be dissolved?
• What is Wilsonianism?
• Characterize America’s foreign affairs in the Middle East. 
• What rights does a stateless person have?
• Amnesty international: criticism and controversies.
• What has the Pan-African movement achieved? 
• How did American government respond to the Arab Spring? 

📚 Political Science Topics to Research

Political science studies collective decisions and their consequences. Part of this process is analyzing the structure and mechanisms of government. Researchers in this field consider psychological, social, and cultural aspects of political activity.

• The rise of Austria’s Freedom Party in 2000.
• What can game theory tell us about society?
• Discuss the concept of nationhood, its benefits, and pitfalls.
• Trace the development of the Nigerian government from the ’60s up to now. 
• The impact of celebrities on political campaigning. 
• Describe the goals of the anti-globalization movement.
• Why did all Germany’s attempts to form a republic fail until after World War II?
• The effects of poverty on Australian indigenous peoples. 
• What type of events affect voting behavior the most? 
• Examine historical examples of anarchist societies.
• Does a president need to represent all of their country’s citizens ?
• What are the advantages of polling? 
• Can monarchies be democratic?
• What influences people’s political beliefs?
• The regulation of water supply in Latin American countries.
• Describe how the media affects cultural globalization .
• Compare right and left-wing terrorist groups. 
• What constitutes tyranny?
• How does the Saudi Arabian government work?

• The relationship between the automobile industry and politics in Japan .
• Crisis theory, its strengths, and its weaknesses.
• What are the goals of the alt-right?
• The historical significance of the treaty of Westphalia.
• Was the Equal Rights Amendment doomed to fail? What is its current status? 
• How does tourism affect Caribbean politics?
• What makes someone a leader?
• Discuss how powerful states influence poorer ones.
• How does the EU make decisions? 
• Examine the success rate of petitions.
• The psychology behind supporting extremist groups. 
• The mechanics of propaganda: when language becomes a political tool. 
• Class 12 political education: preparing students to vote in their first election.
• Analyze the structure of the Chinese Communist Party.
• What does the Lemon test determine?
• Is fear a good instrument of control?
• The political danger of fake news .
• How do civil wars happen? 
• Political culture: why did democracy in Iraq fail? 
• Investigate the conflict between China and Tibet.
• Should institutions benefit society’s poorest members?
• The role of poverty in driving the popularity of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
• Why do some people miss the Soviet Union? 
• What are the differences between the IS and al-Qaeda?
• Organization of the Taliban government in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. 
• Political radicalization on the internet. 
• The importance of women in governments .
• Balance of power theory and modern world order.
• The dangers of neopatrimonialism in African politics.
• Why was the French Revolution an important event in history?
• What influences outside the government can impact policymaking? 

🏛️ Best Political Philosophy Essay Topics

What type of systems can ensure a happy life for everyone? Political philosophy, or political theory, seeks to answer this question. Its goal is to create a social standard by applying ethics to politics. Get contemplative with our interesting political theory paper topics:

• How ethical is capitalism ?
• Explore the ideological connection between liberalism and feminism.
• How close is your community to Plato’s ideal society?
• What would happen if we leave capitalism behind?
• Discuss the concept of democracy in political theory.
• Ethical issues concerning globalization .
• What would Aristotle say about the world’s current state of affairs?
• Marx’s and Lenin’s imperialism theories.
• Was Jean-Jacques Rousseau right in saying that a civil society began with a fence?
• Is restricting immigration an ethical way to increase wages? 
• How relevant is John Locke’s social contract theory today?
• Explore the problems of democratic transition and consolidation.
• Analyze the shortcomings of positivism.
• Discuss John Rawls’ position on justice.
• What is philosophical anarchism ?
• How does Michel Foucault explain the development of Western penal systems in Discipline and Punish ?
• Discuss grounds on which war is morally permissible or even necessary.
• The influence of existentialism on Western politics.
• What events sparked the foundation of the Paris Commune?
• How can governments and communities cooperate?
• Can religion have a positive influence on lawmaking?
• What does it mean to have authority ?
• Should governments provide stability or freedom of choice?
• The influence of revisionism on the German Social Democratic Party policies.
• Is gerrymandering always unjust? 
• How did the idea of democracy change from ancient Greece to modern times? 
• Is the law always morally right?
• The role of violence in the ideologies of Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
• Police corruption: understanding and prevention.
• Is democracy indeed a rule by the people? 
• What’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
• The role of power from the post-structuralist perspective.
• Is there a big divide between Asian and Western political ideology?
• What motivates someone to be politically active?
• Why are students typically engaged in politics?
• Is populism ethical? 
• Provide an advanced perspective of public policy. 
• Should the state be allowed to decide whether an individual can end their life?
• The meaning of the term “liberalism” from its origins to this day. 
• What do feminists mean by saying “the personal is political”?
• How do you define the word “ political ”?
• Discuss dehumanization and its evolution in warfare.
• If you could start a whole culture anew, what would its principles be?
• Analyze how pornography can be political.
• Policymaking: systemic thinking on various levels. 
• Are liberal government models the end of political development? 
• How did the US government morally justify the Vietnam war ?
• According to Thomas Hobbes, why do citizens need a Leviathan ?
• Describe Machiavelli’s position concerning the role of religion in politics. 
• The influence of Ayn Rand’s objectivism on libertarian movements.

⚖️ Comparative Politics Essay Topics

Have you ever wondered how the state influences a nation’s economy? Scholars of comparative politics know the answer. They analyze governments by comparing and contrasting them. Choose a topic in this category to discover the differences between various political systems.

• What causes nations to transform their governments?
• Define the differences between a nation and a nation-state. 
• Causes of war: comparative politics and peace studies.
• The politics of baby boomers vs. millennials .
• Is the “tyranny of the majority” an unavoidable weakness of democracy? 
• Characteristics of authoritarian vs. totalitarian regimes. 

• What are the differences between laws and executive orders ?
• How does bureaucracy work in Norway vs. Russia?
• Living conditions in South African squatter settlements and Brazilian favelas.
• Compare conservative ideology in the US vs. the Netherlands.
• What is the ideological difference between liberalism and conservatism? 
• Discuss the advantages of a participatory vs. a representative democracy .
• What are the current trends in democratization ?
• Compare the contents of the French vs. the British constitution .
• Describe the differences between federal and unitary governments. 
• The executive’s role in Japan vs. China.
• Political parties in Canada: ideological analysis.
• What does it take to pass a law in Finland as compared to Sweden?
• How does the naturalization process work in Canada vs. the US?
• What factors impact political participation in different countries? 
• How does a country’s education influence its citizens’ political activity?
• Analyze the role of interest groups in the USA and Poland. 
• How do presidential systems work in comparison to parliamentary systems?
• Idealism versus realism in international politics
• Ownership laws in Nigeria vs. Eritrea.
• Compare Saddam Hussein’s regime with societies from Orwell’s 1984 .
• Identify current trends in voter turnout. 
• What constitutes the civil society in India and Pakistan? 
• Contrast the structures and influence of the top five grassroots movements. 
• The role of independent media in political education.
• What factors determine whether a societal change is successful?
• Compare American and Icelandic healthcare systems.
• Protest votes: in which system do they work best?
• Which fundamental ideologies do most of the world’s democracies share?
• The social consequences of corruption in Mexico vs. Venezuela.
• The perception of conservatism in the US vs. other countries.
• Analyze Indian and Brazilian democracies. 
• Revolving door politics in Japan vs. Australia.
• How is gender equality institutionalized in different countries?
• Why are green parties more successful in Europe than in the US?
• Contrast political education across the states of the former Soviet Union .
• The influence of the military on the government in the US vs. New Zealand. 
• Achievements of the LGBT movement in Poland and the Czech Republic.
• What are sustainability measures in South Africa vs. Senegal?
• The evolution of women’s rights in Russia vs. Switzerland. 
• How does federalism in Brazil differ from the one in America? 
• Compare Peru’s and Lesotho’s unitary systems.
• Comparison between Florida and Maryland’s legislative frameworks.
• Contrast various military governments. Can they be beneficial for the public?
• Political socialization in France vs. India.

💵 Political Economy Topics to Write About

Are you interested in how trade relates to a nation’s law and government? Then this section is for you. Scholars in this field study how economic theories influence societies. On top of that, they advise governments on economic policies and proposals. Find a great topic in the list below:

• Economic interdependence theory and future of trade.
• How do oligopolies influence the market?
• What are the economic effects of taxation ?
• Do democratic countries have better economies than autocratic states?
• Did NAFTA overall benefit Mexico’s economy?
• The oil industry in Saudi Arabia: analysis and strategies.
• Globalization and the economy: interrelations and consequences.
• What are the goals of the WTO?
• How did the foundation of OPEC shape oil trade?
• What factors influence the global GMO market?
• Explain the concept of the invisible hand.
• What are the characteristics of public goods?
• Does private ownership necessarily lead to inequality?
• How did mercantilism affect colonized countries?
• Define critical political economy theory.
• What role does mass media play in a nation’s economic decisions?
• The current revival of neoliberalism .
• Why does the exchange rate matter? 
• The role of competition in politics. 
• How did the development of financial systems impact governments? 
• Why did President Trump’s tax reports cause a scandal?
• How did economic troubles lead to political tensions in the EU?
• What policies did countries in South-East Asia implement to drive economic growth? 
• Can guaranteed income prevent socio-economic crises?
• How are pension age policies connected to a country’s economic situation?
• The impact of terrorism on oil prices and production. 
• What were the political pros and cons of the gold standard ?
• Does the trade war between the US and China have the potential to affect global trade? 
• What types of governments are more likely to engage in protectionism? 
• How is America “weaponizing” the dollar?
• Discuss risk management strategies during the financial crisis in the US.
• Utilitarian ethics in political economy.
• What is the minimum wage , and how do you calculate it?
• Do big companies have too much political influence?
• The effects of gender-biased laws on economic systems .
• What are the economic concerns behind sustainable policies?
• Why are European countries struggling to convert to green energies ?
• Does turning away from fossil fuels automatically mean a decrease in economic growth? 
• How do policies create wealth gaps?
• What do wealthy countries do to stay rich?
• Describe the political consequences of outsourcing .
• The connection between political instability and widespread poverty .
• The political economy of financing conflicts in the Middle East.
• Why do countries export weapons to war-torn areas?
• How do political power balances create inequality?
• The politics of free markets vs. planned economies.
• What are the key elements of the political economy, according to Marxism ?
• Explain the 19th-century socialist ideology.
• What effects do a country’s political institutions have on the development of organized crime ?
• Feminism in the political economy .

🍴 Food Politics Essay Topics

Decisions concerning packaging labels and food safety regulations belong in the realm of food politics. This branch also encompasses aspects related to food production, distribution, and consumption. Dive into the world of food politics with one of our popular writing ideas:

• How much should the government influence our food choices ?
• What’s political about our diet?
• How do food politics influence our eating habits ?
• Why do most American food production companies add sugar and syrup to bread?
• The politics of kid-targeted food advertising.
• What are the differences between the major labels of organic food ?
• Should conventional agriculture still be subsidized?
• What are the most dominant conflicts of interest in the agricultural industry today?
• What can governments do to make fresh and healthy foods more accessible? 
• Compare various government-sponsored programs to promote a healthy diet .
• How does the demand regulate the market in terms of food products ?
• Will we ever be able to eradicate hunger globally?
• How can policies and restrictions make the food industry more sustainable?
• Why are food politics crucial to achieving development goals?
• Should governments ban plastic bags and packaging?
• Following the annexation of Crimea, Russia received heavy sanctions. It prompted President Putin to ban the import of food products from Europe and the US. How does this affect the country? 
• Monsanto: the political influence of America’s former biggest GMO seed distributor.
• What issues are associated with eco-friendly food packaging?
• What would be the consequences of outlawing alcohol?

• Should there be a ban on advertisements for unhealthy foods?
• Lobbying tactics in the alcohol industry.
• Discuss the benefits of implementing higher taxes on soft drinks.
• When can a company label their product as “natural”?
• Discuss the problems related to US school cafeterias.
• The danger of alcopops: policies that prevent early alcohol consumption. 
• Challenges of regulating deceptive health claims.
• How does sponsored research influence nutritional guidelines?
• The biopolitics of nutrition and food distribution.
• What should all food labels contain to ensure safe consumption? 
• The vegan movement’s impact on the organic food market.
• How did industrialization change the way we eat?
• Is ethnic food underrepresented in nutritional guidelines? If so, why?
• Discuss the role of price in alcohol consumption.
• Why is cannabis banned in many countries, but cigarettes aren’t?
• Sin tax: what are its unintended social repercussions?
• How do gruesome pictures on cigarette packages influence smoking behavior?
• Consumption of harmful products in states with and without a sin tax.
• Treatment of migrant fruit pickers in Texas. 
• California removed sugary drinks and sweets from its public schools. Did this lead to a decrease in youth obesity? 
• Food safety: a policy issue in agriculture today.
• What would sustainable policies on regulating food waste be?
• Should governments allocate more resources into cloning research to satisfy the meat demand? 
• The political influence of the American meat industry.
• Should animal rights be secured in the constitution?
• The development of whale hunting laws in Japan.
• What type of regulations could ensure sustainable fishing? 
• What’s the problem with “Big food”?
• Examine the food vs. fuel dilemma.
• Discuss the court case in which a Colorado bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.
• Denial of food access as a war weapon.

🌱 Environmental Political Research Topics

Issues like sustainability and climate change need coordinated political decisions. That’s where environmental politics comes into play. This branch analyzes policymaking as well as political theories and ideas concerning the environment. Besides, it investigates what position political parties and social movements have on the matter. If you want to address environmental concerns in your essay, this section is for you.

• How can the global power of the church be used to drive sustainability agendas?
• Why do some arid countries want to tow icebergs? What are the environmental consequences of this practice?
• What are the goals of the carbon tax? 
• Why should cities endorse greenways in their urban planning? 
• How did Nigerian activists react to the environmental consequences of the country’s excessive oil production?
• Political strategies to preserve biodiversity .
• What did the Kyoto protocol achieve? 
• Why didn’t Iran and Turkey sign the Paris Agreement? 
• Explore the environmental positions of various parties across the political spectrum.
• Is sustainability a viable aspiration for a community? 
• Why are liberal governments more likely to address environmental concerns than conservative ones?
• Does it take an authoritarian state to combat global warming effectively? 
• The benefits of environmental education in class 11.
• How do interest groups manipulate political action against environmental problems ?
• Is lobbyism responsible for the hesitation in terms of setting strict sustainability goals?
• The Clean Water Act: achievements and shortcomings.
• Are governments doing enough to tackle environmental issues ?
• The success of market mechanisms in environmental policymaking.
• Discuss the progress made to control air pollution in China.
• What roles do NGOs play in driving policies to protect nature?
• Are environmental politics mostly moving forward in times of a crisis? 
• Geoengineering: should governments rely on changing the weather instead of adjusting regulations? 
• Discuss the correlation between energy crisis and climate change.
• How will Indonesia’s new Omnibus Law impact environmental politics?
• The influence of social movements in making the fishery industry more sustainable. 
• How can governments ensure green conservation without reducing their country’s living standards?
• Is ecoterrorism a good way to bring attention to under-discussed problems?
• Investigate how environmental politics can reconcile its proponents with its adversaries.
• How did Hannah Arendt influence modern political thought about nature?
• What is ecofeminism , and what are its goals?
• Implications of the Gaia hypothesis for environmental politics.
• Provide an outline of an environmental conservation project.
• Al Gore’s influence on environmental decisions during his time as vice president.
• Sustainability initiatives in the US vs. Europe.
• The significance of environmental politics in international relations.
• Discuss the link between social justice movements and the rise of green parties.
• Should the California government promote native fire tending techniques to save the state’s forests?
• An Inconvenient Truth : legacy and criticism.
• Do not let Belgrade d(r)own: environmental activism in the Balkans.
• The role of the military in protecting nature.
• What plans does the New Zealand government have to reduce carbon emissions?
• Responsible mining practices in the Philippines.

• Political cooperation efforts for protecting the Caspian Sea.
• Discuss the benefits and costs of the US acid rain program.
• How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact environmental policymaking? 
• The role of populism in addressing climate change .
• Radioactive waste management policies in the EU.
• Contrast the methods of various climate justice organizations.
• How can we use AI to protect the environment? 
• Combating food waste in Norway: consequences of introducing the phrase “best before, often good after” on food labels.

📖 Political Case Study Topics to Look Into

Case studies are valued among all social sciences. They are an excellent method to learn from real-life examples. What’s even better, you can apply the information you’ve gathered from them to a broader framework. If you prefer a practical approach to politics, check out these compelling ideas:

• The 2011 drought caused the Yangtze River to carry significantly less water. How did this affect Chinese politics?
• The Arctic ice is melting at an unprecedented pace. How do politicians cooperate in combating it?
• Pollution has caused an ecological disaster in Kamchatka. What was the Russian government’s response to the crisis?
• The economic growth of Asian countries has put them on the radar of potential Western allies. What stands in the way of a successful partnership?
• Apartheid in South Africa didn’t end until the 1990s. What events led up to the system’s abolishment?
• Botswana used to be one of the world’s poorest countries. Now, it’s considered a role model for African development. How did it achieve its wealth? 
• Environmental NGOs have positioned themselves against fracking from the very beginning. How do their actions impact congressional decision making? 
• Guinea-Bissau is a haven for the illegal drug trade. Politicians are not able to contain it. How did the situation develop?
• In Nigeria, ethnic minorities and the state claim ownership over the country’s oil reserves. How did this conflict emerge? What has been done to solve it?
• In 2016, military troops attempted to overthrow the Turkish government. Why did they fail?
• In 2020, the military took over the Mali government. How did it happen? What was the international response?
• Kenya remained under British rule until 1963. Describe the consequences colonization had on the country.
• Nornickel is a Russian Nickel and Palladium production company. In 2020, it has caused two major environmental disasters: an oil leakage and a wastewater spill. What were the consequences? What did officials do to cover it up?
• In the 20th century, Latin America was home to many dictatorships. To this day, some countries in the area are struggling with their governments. How did this happen? 
• The Universal Child Allowance is a conditional cash transfer designed to help underage Argentinian children from low-income families. Investigate their impact. 
• Microfinancing has created a debt trap for women in Sri Lanka. As a result, they formed a cooperative movement with better credit conditions. Could such cooperatives be an alternative to microfinancing worldwide? 
• Greece’s refugee camps are notorious for their harsh living conditions. Investigate their access to healthcare. 
• Few countries are as affected by HIV as India. Identify how this phenomenon connects to the nation’s high poverty rate. 
• Civil conflict in Columbia between the far-right, far-left, and the government has been ravaging the country for decades. What strategies could restore peace? 
• Bhutan has recently transitioned from an absolutist monarchy to a democracy. How did religion influence this development? 
• Class identity has been a central topic in post-apartheid South Africa . How are changes in identity perception impacting politics?
• Incarceration rates among black citizens in America are significantly higher than among white people. Discuss how this is linked to racial profiling .
• The Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán funds populist propaganda campaigns. How does he instrumentalize the national identity to drive his agenda?
• During the 2020 elections in the United States, there was no clear result on the election night. Yet, Donald Trump has falsely declared himself the winner before the official announcement. What political intentions did he have? 
• In 2014, Scotland tried to gain independence from Great Britain through a referendum. Why did it fail? Would it be more likely to succeed now? 
• Women’s rights in countries under Islamic rule are often underdeveloped. How did the Musawah movement influence lawmaking in these nations?
• Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion is the world’s most secure airport. Explore its history. What makes it unique?
• Ever since its foundation, the US has been a dream destination for many immigrants. How did this situation change since President Trump promised to build the wall?
• The Antarctic has plenty of lands to offer. Currently, governments are engaging in territorial disputes. Who does this land belong to? Why is this debate relevant?
• Since 2019, Hong Kong people have been protesting laws that potentially impose closer legal bonds with mainland China. How did these protests influence the legislature so far? How did the governments in Hong Kong and China react? 
• The Gaza strip has been a center of an ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel. How did its latest developments influence Israeli security politics?
• Child labor is a significant problem in the Philippines. What does the country do to tackle it? 
• South Ossetia is a Caucasus region fighting for autonomy. It is officially recognized as part of Georgia by most countries. Plans to integrate the de facto state with Russian North Ossetia have failed. What caused the fights? What can be done to solve the conflict?
• Asian countries are developing rapidly. It causes economic competition for the neighboring nations. What factors led China and Japan to emerge as global players? 
• In Vietnam, agriculture has undergone significant changes in the past decades. How have these transformations impacted farmers? 
• The Ottoman Empire used to be an enormous state. It encompassed most of Southeastern Europe and much of Arabia. How did its dissolution lead to modern-day conflicts on the Arabian Peninsula?
• Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. How does the government ensure enough housing opportunities?
• The Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammad bin Salman was celebrated for his liberal economic and social reforms. Why was he suspected of ordering the assassination of journalist and government critic Jamal Khashoggi? 
• Colton is a valuable mineral found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The excessive mining of the resource has led to increased criminal activity and conflict. How is this impacting the local civilians? What solutions have been proposed?
• Sierra Leone was engaged in a war with the Revolutionary United Front for 11 years. How did foreign intervention resolve the conflict? How did this experience impact the current political situation?
• Until its criminalization in 1997, cannabis has been a medicinal staple in Pakistan . Recently, the government approved the industrial production of the drug. What were the reasons for it? How is this going to affect the country’s economy? 
• In Japan, decreasing birth rates have led to a steep decline in the population. What plans does the government have to tackle this problem?
• 4chan is an anonymous forum that caters to all kinds of interests. It is infamous for spreading hate and online radicalization. Some of America’s recent mass shooters were connected with the site, as is QAnon. What led to this development? Should the website be taken down? 
• In 2019, American colleges were at the center of a bribery scandal. Celebrities tried to enroll their children with substandard grades into prestigious schools such as USC and Yale. How can colleges maintain their funding while ensuring equal opportunities for the less wealthy candidates?
• In the Ice Bucket Challenge , people poured a bucket of ice water over their heads. It was supposed to raise awareness for ALS. How did this activity impact disease research funding?
• In 2017 and 2018, Finland studied the consequences of universal basic income. What did the findings suggest? Should other countries adopt this strategy? 
• Tesla electric car company has reinvented the automobile industry with its vehicles. What role did the company play in raising awareness of sustainability issues?
• Facebook is financed by targeted ads and data trade. How is this influencing voter behavior?
• The Interview is a 2014 political satire film in which American journalists plot to kill Kim-Jong Un. The film sparked outrage in North Korea. How did this impact US-North Korean political relations? 
• In the US, advertisements for prescription drugs aren’t illegal. How does this influence consumer behavior in comparison with the countries where such advertisements are banned? 

✍️ How to Write an Essay on Politics

Are you eager to start your paper right away? Check these helpful essay writing tips! Keep them in mind when talking about political issue topics:

• Research. Read your notes first, then search the internet. Academic journals and government sites are an excellent place to start. Stay on point; don’t waste your time with sources that are not relevant to your topic.
• The introduction presents all the essential terms and relevant literature. Your thesis statement belongs there.
• Your paper’s body includes your arguments and supporting evidence. Use topic sentences to introduce your point.
• The conclusion contains a summary of the essay’s key points.
• Style and format. Write concisely in a formal manner. Ask your tutor for formatting requirements such as font, size, space, or margin. Don’t forget to include a reference list at the end.
• Editing and proofreading. Check for spelling and grammar mistakes. Make sure all your arguments are directly connected to your topic. Lastly, make sure to cite all your sources properly.

That’s all we’ve got for you. We hope this article was useful and wish you good luck with your assignment!

Further reading:

• 512 Research Topics on HumSS (Humanities & Social Sciences)
• 430 Philosophy Topics & Questions for Your Essay
• 560 Unique Controversial Topics & Tips for a Great Essay
• 240 Controversial Debate Topics and Questions for Discussion
• 625 Excellent Presentation Topics & Tips
• A List of 212 Brilliant Research Proposal Topics to Investigate
• 497 Interesting History Topics to Research
• 435 Literary Analysis Essay Topics and Prompts [Upd]
• 417 Business Research Topics for ABM Students
• What Is Politics?: The Open University
• Political Topics: Pew Research Center
• Politics & Political Systems: Encyclopedia Britannica
• Studying Global Politics: International Baccalaureate
• Global Politics from the View of the Political Economy Trilemma: VOX EU
• Managing 21st Century Political Risk: Harvard Business Review
• US President Donald Trump and His Administration: Statistics & Facts: Statista.com
• The Purposes of Government: US History
• Undergraduate Sample Research Topics: Political Science: Western Michigan University
• US Government and Politics: History.com
• What is Political Science?: University of Washington
• Political Philosophy: Methodology: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Social Science and Comparative Politics: Saylor Academy
• Research Guides: Writing a Case Study: University of Southern California
• Political Economy: Corporate Finance Institute
• Topics in Political Economy: Trinity College Dublin
• Food Politics and Development: Science Direct
• Food Politics: United States: Encyclopedia.com
• Importance of Environmental Ethics: Maryville University
• American Politics Courses: University of California San Diego
• Political Philosophy: Routledge.com
• Overview of Comparative Politics: Oxford Handbooks
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Mathematics is the science of numbers and shapes. Writing about it can give you a fresh perspective and help to clarify difficult concepts. You can even use mathematical writing as a tool in problem-solving. In this article, you will find plenty of interesting math topics. Besides, you will learn about...

Cause and effect essays examine how an event happened and what consequences it had. Gaining weight after eating lots of fast food is an example of a cause-and-effect relationship. Possible topics cover a variety of subjects ranging from mental health to history and politics. This article gives you an outline...

An analysis essay aims to break down the subject in order to understand it. You can choose to analyze a text, a process, or an idea. This article will help you write a great essay! Selecting an interesting topic makes writing a lot easier. We’ve prepared a list of excellent...

Everybody knows that being healthy requires effort. We should exercise regularly and maintain a balanced diet. However, the reward is worth it. A healthy lifestyle prevents chronic illnesses and leads to better body performance. Besides, if you improve your physical well-being, your mental health will strengthen as well! In this...