The effect of plague and famine on Europe.

 

 

Discuss the effect of plague and famine on Europe.

 

 

Sample Solution

The effect of plague and famine on Europe

When the Black Death swept through Europe in 1347, it was one of the deadliest disease outbreaks in human history, eventually killing between a third and half of Europeans. A widespread famine that weakened the population over decades could help explain the Black Death`s particularly high mortality. Plague brought an eventual end of Serfdom in Western Europe. The manorial system was already in trouble, but the Black Death assured its demise throughout much of western and central Europe by 1500. Severe depopulation and migration of the village to cities caused an acute shortage of agricultural laborers.

st helpful to explore what democracy truly entails. Democracy is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives. A common characteristic in all democracies is existence of an election; whereby citizens of the country can exercise their rights to express their preferred choice of political actors. However, this is not the only characteristic, as the study of political science has made expansive research on how a democracy is actually determined. For instance, The Democracy-Dictatorship Measure by Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland (2010) serves as a dichotomous measure of where a country stands in terms of its system of governance. A country is a democracy if it elects its chief executive, if it elects it’s legislature, if there is more than one party competing in the elections as well as if alternation in power has taken place. More popularly is the use of the Polity IV score, which is calculated by subtracting a country’s Democracy score to its Autocracy score (democracies generally score a +6 to a +10). Different countries practice democracy differently; for instance, some democracies practice a parliamentary system, whereas others adopt a presidential system, but in the end, the power is in the people. To evaluate the feasibility of all countries becoming and remaining democratic, we have to analyse certain controversial factors and opinions that have been brought up by political scientists around the globe. Some political scientists do not hold on to the opinion that all countries could become democracies. This is because of factors such as culture and religion that are thought to reduce the probability of a country becoming democratic. Why this is so is because of the perception that democracy just is not suited for certain cultures and religions and in extension, the lifestyles of people who practice them. Certain scholars hold primordialist arguments that treat culture and religion as something that is objective and inherited. This basically means that cultures and religions are unable to go through any form of modernization that allows to it adopt democracy. In relation to this, Almond and Verba conducted an interesting research on the existence of a particular “political culture”, in particular, a civic culture. A civic culture reflects a cluster of attitudes that include the belief on the part of individuals that they can influence political decisions, positive feelings toward the political system, high levels of interpersonal trust and preferences for gradual societal change. Almond and Verba believed that for a country to be democratic, its citizens needed to have a civic culture. Besides this, there are also arguments that state that specific religions just do not have the ideal grounds for democracy. Take Islam for example; it is believed that the rules and ideals in Islamic culture is incompatible with the ideals of a democratic nation. For instance, Islam’s ob

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