Essay Question: You are a U.S. Senator questioning a nominee for U.S. Secretary of State about the ...

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Essay Question: You are a U.S. Senator questioning a nominee for U.S. Secretary of State about the difference between democracies and authoritarian regimes. The nominee states the following: “It’s so easy and so very simple to distinguish democracies from authoritarian regimes: a) All democracies are just like us, the U.S. Everydemocracy in the world practices presidentialism with separation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and they have elections using the single-member district (SMD) first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. There simply is no other style of democracy in the world. Every democracy follows the U.S. format. b) All authoritarian regimes are exactly the same. Everyauthoritarian regime is ruled by one dictator who is called the “supreme leader”. There are absolutely no other types of authoritarian regimes in the world. Also, there will never be a legislative branch, judicial branch, or any use for elections at all in authoritarian regimes. That’s it!! There’s nothing more to this!!” Is the nominee right for both a) and b)? Or are things more complex in the world? Write an essay in which you evaluate all of his claims using your superior knowledge of comparative politics. Discuss and explain in detail everything that you think the nominee missed or overlooked. The most important thing is to really, really explain your thinking. The more evidence from class (like specific class concepts, examples, discussions, videos, etc.) that you can include to support your argument, the better you will do on the essay. You must address both a) and b) in your essay. You must use the things that we covered in lecture in your essay. If your essay is missing relevant info from lecture, there will be substantial point deductions. Please upload your essay to Canvas under the “Midterm Exam Part 2” assignment. Please follow the instruction as displayed under “Midterm Exam Part 2” on Canvas to correctly upload your essay. Your essay must be an actual file that can be uploaded (Microsoft Word document, PDF document, etc.) to Canvas. I will not accept links to your documents stored on sharable drives, cloud storage, etc. Beware: once you upload your essay, it automatically goes through an online plagiarism check against other essays submitted for this class, for other classes at ELAC and elsewhere, as well as material found on the internet. If your essay gets a “plagiarism alert”, it will not be tolerated and will require further disciplinary action in accordance with ELAC policy.