Hello comrades! I totally forgot to write about what happened during my second day of PoliSci. I was so tired and instantly passed out when I got back.

Anyway, I don’t suspect I’ll be writing about every single class I have, only the ‘eventful’ ones. And class number two was kinda spicy!

So this class was about Democracy. We went over definitions and the differences of authority:

Authority - perceived right to rule, brings moral obligation on the ruled to obey.

Traditional Authority - based on history and bloodlines. Basically the monarchy. England and Saudi Arabia were brought up as examples.

Legal Rational Authority - aka Bureaucratic Authority. Based on the election. Not much was said to be honest.

Charismatic Authority - super human qualities of the leader. An ability to awe with words. My professor brought up Hitler as an example, he said Castro’s name but was interrupted by a student asking if Trump fit the bill.

Legitimacy - Rightfulness to rule and exercise power with the consent of the people. A girl from Türkiye in my class used Kim Jung-Un as an example, stating he was illegitimate because he only rules on account of birthright.

My professor surprisingly pushed back on this talking about how the people seem to want him as leader. Then another girl talked about how they are all brainwashed—with a guy chiming in that North Koreans are too scared to speak out against the government. My professor laughed both of these statements off! Basically stating that we don’t have enough information about North Korea to be making these judgements.

We went over Substantive and Procedural democracy. Substantive encompassing civil liberties, basic rights and freedoms. Political equality. Procedural being about elections, which is minimalist and does not mean a system is democratic on its own. Both Substantive and Procedural work together.

Putin was brought up when we were discussing Substantive democracy, basically stating that the people of Russia do not have the freedom to criticize Putin due to the risk of being “disappeared”. I’ve heard this statement a lot over the years but I genuinely have no idea if it’s true. I made sure to write a little note for myself so I wouldn’t forget to mention it here.

The rest of the class was about Liberal Democracy and the differences between The Parliamentary System and Presidential system. Which was fine but did get me thinking about how a lot o countries have both a President and a Prime Minister, so how the hell does that work?

Anyway that’s all I have for now, if any of you have any questions I am more than happy to answer.

Edit: I apologize for any grammatical and/or spelling mistakes. I am typing this on a new keyboard so I’m getting used to the different size, button weight, and formatting. It’s an iPad Bluetooth keyboard so it’s smaller and the keys have different inputs than what I’m used to.