Political science is a social science which
deals with systems of governance, and the
analysis of political activities, political
thoughts, and political behavior. It deals
extensively with the theory and practice of
politics which is commonly thought of as determining
of the distribution of power and resources.
Political scientists "see themselves engaged
in revealing the relationships underlying
political events and conditions, and from
these revelations they attempt to construct
general principles about the way the world
of politics works."Political science -- occasionally
called politicology -- comprises numerous
subfields, including comparative politics,
political economy, international relations,
political theory, public administration, public
policy, and political methodology. Furthermore,
political science is related to, and draws
upon, the fields of economics, law, sociology,
history, philosophy, geography, psychology/psychiatry,
and anthropology.
Comparative politics is the science of comparison
and teaching of different types of constitutions,
political actors, legislature and associated
fields, all of them from an intrastate perspective.
International relations deals with the interaction
between nation-states as well as intergovernmental
and transnational organizations. Political
theory is more concerned with contributions
of various classical and contemporary thinkers
and philosophers.
Political science is methodologically diverse
and appropriates many methods originating
in social research. Approaches include positivism,
interpretivism, rational choice theory, behaviouralism,
structuralism, post-structuralism, realism,
institutionalism, and pluralism. Political
science, as one of the social sciences, uses
methods and techniques that relate to the
kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources
such as historical documents and official
records, secondary sources such as scholarly
journal articles, survey research, statistical
analysis, case studies, experimental research,
and model building.
== Overview ==
Political scientists study matters concerning
the allocation and transfer of power in decision
making, the roles and systems of governance
including governments and international organizations,
political behaviour and public policies. They
measure the success of governance and specific
policies by examining many factors, including
stability, justice, material wealth, peace
and public health. Some political scientists
seek to advance positive (attempt to describe
how things are, as opposed to how they should
be) theses by analysing politics. Others advance
normative theses, by making specific policy
recommendations.
Political scientists provide the frameworks
from which journalists, special interest groups,
politicians, and the electorate analyse issues.
According to Chaturvedy,
Political scientists may serve as advisers
to specific politicians, or even run for office
as politicians themselves. Political scientists
can be found working in governments, in political
parties or as civil servants. They may be
involved with non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) or political movements. In a variety
of capacities, people educated and trained
in political science can add value and expertise
to corporations. Private enterprises such
as think tanks, research institutes, polling
and public relations firms often employ political
scientists.
In the United States, political scientists
known as "Americanists" look at a variety
of data including constitutional development,
elections, public opinion, and public policy
such as Social Security reform, foreign policy,
US Congressional committees, and the US Supreme
Court — to name only a few issues.
Because political science is essentially a
study of human behaviour, in all aspects of
politics, observations in controlled environments
are often challenging to reproduce or duplicate,
though experimental methods are increasingly
common (see experimental political science).
Citing this difficulty, former American Political
Science Association President Lawrence Lowell
once said "We are limited by the impossibility
of experiment. Politics is an observational,
not an experimental science." Because of this,
political scientists have historically observed
political elites, institutions, and individual
or group behaviour in order to identify patterns,
draw generalizations, and build theories of
politics.
Like all social sciences, political science
faces the difficulty of observing human actors
that can only be partially observed and who
have the capacity for making conscious choices
unlike other subjects such as non-human organisms
in biology or inanimate objects as in physics.
Despite the complexities, contemporary political
science has progressed by adopting a variety
of methods and theoretical approaches to understanding
politics and methodological pluralism is a
defining feature of contemporary political
science.
The advent of political science as a university
discipline was marked by the creation of university
departments and chairs with the title of political
science arising in the late 19th century.
In fact, the designation "political scientist"
is typically for those with a doctorate in
the field, but can also apply to those with
a master's in the subject. Integrating political
studies of the past into a unified discipline
is ongoing, and the history of political science
has provided a rich field for the growth of
both normative and positive political science,
with each part of the discipline sharing some
historical predecessors. The American Political
Science Association and the American Political
Science Review were founded in 1903 and 1906,
respectively, in an effort to distinguish
the study of politics from economics and other
social phenomena. To date, the American Political
Science Review is the leading journal in Political
Science research.
=== Behavioural revolution and new institutionalism
===
In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioural
revolution stressing the systematic and rigorously
scientific study of individual and group behaviour
swept the discipline. A focus on studying
political behaviour, rather than institutions
or interpretation of legal texts, characterized
early behavioural political science, including
work by Robert Dahl, Philip Converse, and
in the collaboration between sociologist Paul
Lazarsfeld and public opinion scholar Bernard
Berelson.
The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a
take off in the use of deductive, game theoretic
formal modelling techniques aimed at generating
a more analytical corpus of knowledge in the
discipline. This period saw a surge of research
that borrowed theory and methods from economics
to study political institutions, such as the
United States Congress, as well as political
behaviour, such as voting. William H. Riker
and his colleagues and students at the University
of Rochester were the main proponents of this
shift.
Despite considerable research progress in
the discipline based on all the kinds of scholarship
discussed above, it has been observed that
progress toward systematic theory has been
modest and uneven.
=== Anticipating of crises ===
The theory of political transitions, and the
methods of their analysis and anticipating
of crises, form an important part of political
science. Several general indicators of crises
and methods were proposed for anticipating
critical transitions. Among them, a statistical
indicator of crisis, simultaneous increase
of variance and correlations in large groups,
was proposed for crises anticipation and successfully
used in various areas. Its applicability for
early diagnosis of political crises was demonstrated
by the analysis of the prolonged stress period
preceding the 2014 Ukrainian economic and
political crisis. There was a simultaneous
increase in the total correlation between
the 19 major public fears in the Ukrainian
society (by about 64%) and also in their statistical
dispersion (by 29%) during the pre-crisis
years. A feature shared by certain major revolutions
is that they were not predicted. The theory
of apparent inevitability of crises and revolutions
was also developed.
=== Political science in the Soviet Union
===
In the Soviet Union, political studies were
carried out under the guise of some other
disciplines like theory of state and law,
area studies, international relations, studies
of labor movement, "critique of bourgeois
theories", etc. Soviet scholars were represented
at the International Political Science Association
(IPSA) since 1955 (since 1960 by the Soviet
Association of Political and State Studies).
In 1979, the 11th World Congress of IPSA took
place in Moscow. Until the late years of the
Soviet Union, political science as a field
was subjected to tight control of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and was thus subjected
to distrust. Anti-communists accused political
scientists of being "false" scientists and
of having served the old regime.After the
fall of the Soviet Union, two of the major
institutions dealing with political science,
the Institute of Contemporary Social Theories
and the Institute of International Affairs,
were disbanded, and most of their members
were left without jobs. These institutes were
victims of the first wave of anticommunist
opinion and ideological attacks. Today, the
Russian Political Science Association unites
professional political scientists from all
around Russia.
=== Recent developments ===
In 2000, the Perestroika Movement in political
science was introduced as a reaction against
what supporters of the movement called the
mathematicization of political science. Those
who identified with the movement argued for
a plurality of methodologies and approaches
in political science and for more relevance
of the discipline to those outside of it.Evolutionary
psychology theories argue that humans have
evolved a highly developed set of psychological
mechanisms for dealing with politics. However,
these mechanisms evolved for dealing with
the small group politics that characterized
the ancestral environment and not the much
larger political structures in today's world.
This is argued to explain many important features
and systematic cognitive biases of current
politics.
== Political science education ==
Political science, possibly like the social
sciences as a whole, "as a discipline lives
on the fault line between the 'two cultures'
in the academy, the sciences and the humanities."
Thus, in some American colleges where there
is no separate School
or College of Arts and Sciences per se, political
science may be a separate department housed
as part of a division or school of Humanities
or Liberal Arts. Whereas classical political
philosophy is primarily defined by a concern
for Hellenic and Enlightenment thought, political
scientists are also marked by a great concern
for "modernity" and the contemporary nation
state, along with the study of classical thought,
and as such share a greater deal of terminology
with sociologists (e.g. structure and agency).
Most United States colleges and universities
offer B.A. programs in political science.
M.A. or M.A.T. and Ph.D. or Ed.D. programs
are common at larger universities. The term
political science is more popular in North
America than elsewhere; other institutions,
especially those outside the United States,
see political science as part of a broader
discipline of political studies, politics,
or government. While political science implies
use of the scientific method, political studies
implies a broader approach, although the naming
of degree courses does not necessarily reflect
their content. Separate degree granting programs
in international relations and public policy
are not uncommon at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels. Master's level programs
in political science are common when political
scientists engage in public administration.The
national honor society for college and university
students of government and politics in the
United States is Pi Sigma Alpha.
=== Cognate fields ===
Most political scientists work broadly in
one or more of the following five areas:
Comparative politics, including area studies
International relations
Political philosophy or political theory
Public administration
Public lawSome political science departments
also classify methodology as well as scholarship
on the domestic politics of a particular country
as distinct fields. In the United States,
American politics is often treated as a separate
subfield.
In contrast to this traditional classification,
some academic departments organize scholarship
into thematic categories, including political
philosophy, political behaviour (including
public opinion, collective action, and identity),
and political institutions (including legislatures
and international organizations). Political
science conferences and journals often emphasize
scholarship in more specific categories. The
American Political Science Association, for
example, has 42 organized sections that address
various methods and topics of political inquiry.
== History ==
As a social science, contemporary political
science started to take shape in the latter
half of the 19th century. At that time it
began to separate itself from political philosophy,
which traces its roots back to the works of
Aristotle, and Plato which were written nearly
2,500 years ago. The term "political science"
was not always distinguished from political
philosophy, and the modern discipline has
a clear set of antecedents including also
moral philosophy, political economy, political
theology, history, and other fields concerned
with normative determinations of what ought
to be and with deducing the characteristics
and functions of the ideal state.
== See also ==
Outline of political science – structured
list of political topics, arranged by subject
area
Index of politics articles – alphabetical
list of political subjects
Political lists – lists of political topics
Political science terminology
Outline of law
Index of law articles
Process tracing
== References ==
== Further reading ==
The Evolution of Political Science (November
2006). APSR Centennial Volume of American
Political Science Review. Apsanet.org. 4 February
2009.
European Political Processes: Essays and Readings
(1968). [Compiled and] ed., with original
essays, by Henry S. Albinski [and] Lawrence
K. Pettit. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. vii, 448
p.
Goodin, R. E.; Klingemann, Hans-Dieter (1996).
A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-829471-9.
Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. and Tausch A. (2016)
Economic Cycles, Crises, and the Global Periphery.
Springer International Publishing, Heidelberg,
New York, Dordrecht, London, ISBN 978-3-319-17780-9;
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, ed. (2007) The State
of Political Science in Western Europe. Opladen:
Barbara Budrich Publishers. ISBN 978-3-86649-045-1.
Schramm, S. F.; Caterino, B., eds. (2006).
Making Political Science Matter: Debating
Knowledge, Research, and Method. New York
and London: New York University Press. Making
Political Science Matter. Google Books. 4
February 2009.
Roskin, M.; Cord, R. L.; Medeiros, J. A.;
Jones, W. S. (2007). Political Science: An
Introduction. 10th ed. New York: Pearson Prentice
Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-242575-9 (10). ISBN 978-0-13-242575-9
(13).
Tausch, A.; Prager, F. (1993). Towards a Socio-Liberal
Theory of World Development. Basingstoke:
Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press and
Springer Publishers.
Tausch, Arno (2015). The political algebra
of global value change. General models and
implications for the Muslim world. With Almas
Heshmati and Hichem Karoui (1st ed.). Nova
Science Publishers, New York. ISBN 978-1-62948-899-8.
Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
Noel, Hans (2010) "Ten Things Political Scientists
Know that You Don’t" The Forum: Vol. 8:
Iss. 3, Article 12.
Zippelius, Reinhold (2003). Geschichte der
Staatsideen (=History of political Ideas),
10th ed. Munich: C.H. Beck. ISBN 3-406-49494-3.
Zippelius, Reinhold (2010). Allgemeine Staatslehre,
Politikwissenschaft (=Political Science),16th
ed. Munich: C.H. Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-60342-6.
== External links ==
Institute for Comparative Research in Human
and Social Sciences (ICR) -Japan
European Consortium for Political Research
International Political Science Association
International Studies Association
IPSAPortal : Top 300 websites for Political
Science
International Association for Political Science
Students
American Political Science Association
Midwest Political Science Association
Southern Political Science Association
Graduate Institute of International and Development
Studies. "Political Science Department which
offers MA and PhD programmes"
Dalmacio Negro, Political Science Emeritus
Professor at CEU San Pablo University, Madrid
(SPAIN)
Political Studies Association of the UK
PROL: Political Science Research Online (prepublished
research)
Truman State University Political Science
Research Design Handbook
A New Nation Votes: American Elections Returns
1787–1825
Comparative Politics in Argentina & Latin
America: Site dedicated to the development
of comparative politics in Latin America.
Introduction to Political Science Video
=== Library guides ===
Library. "Political Science". Research Guides.
United States: University of Michigan.
Bodleian Libraries. "Political Science". LibGuides.
United Kingdom: University of Oxford.
Library. "Politics Research Guide". LibGuides.
New Jersey, United States: Princeton University.
Libraries. "Political Science". Research Guides.
New York, United States: Syracuse University.
University Libraries. "Political Science".
Research Guides. United States: Texas A&M
University.
