Political science

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"Political Analysis" redirects here. For the academic journal, see Political
Analysis (journal).
"Political Science" redirects here. For other uses, see Political Science
(disambiguation).
"Political Studies" redirects here. For the academic journal, see Political Studies
(journal).
Not to be confused with Politicization of science.

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 Political science, occasionally called politology, is a social science which deals
with systems of governance, and the analysis of political activities, political
thoughts, associated constitutions and political behavior. [1]
Political science 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/psychi
atry, anthropology and neurosciences.
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 psychology, social research and cognitive neuroscience.
Approaches include positivism, interpretivism, rational choice
theory, behavioralism, 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historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly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.

Contents

 1Overview
o 1.1Behavioral revolution and new institutionalism
o 1.2Anticipating of crises
o 1.3Soviet Union
o 1.4Recent developments
 2Education
o 2.1Cognate fields
 3Research methods
 4History
 5See also
 6References
 7Further reading
 8External links
o 8.1Library guides

Overview[edit]
Political science is a social study concerning the allocation and transfer
of power in decision making, the roles and systems of governance
including governments and international organizations, political behavior
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.[2]
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 behavior, 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).[3] 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."[4] Because of this, political scientists have historically
observed political elites, institutions, and individual or group behavior 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.[5] 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.
Behavioral revolution and new institutionalism[edit]
In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic and
rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior swept the discipline. A
focus on studying political behavior, rather than institutions or interpretation of
legal texts, characterized early behavioral 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 behavior,
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.[6]
Anticipating of crises[edit]
The theory of political transitions,[7] and the methods of their analysis
and anticipating[4] of crises,[8] form an important part of political science. Several
general indicators of crises and methods were proposed for anticipating critical
transitions.[9] Among them, a statistical indicator of crisis, simultaneous increase
of variance and correlations in large groups, was proposed for crisis anticipation
and may be successfully used in various areas.[10] 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.[11] 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. [12]
Soviet Union[edit]
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. [13]
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[edit]
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.[14]
Some 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.[15]

Education[edit]
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."[16] 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.[17] 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. [18] 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.[19]
The national honor society for college and university students of government and
politics in the United States is Pi Sigma Alpha.
Cognate fields[edit]
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 law
Some 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
behavior (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. [20]

Research methods[edit]
Program evaluation is a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using
information to answer questions about projects, policies and programs,
[21]
 particularly about their effectiveness and efficiency. In both the public and
private sectors, stakeholders often want to know whether the programs they are
funding, implementing, voting for, receiving or objecting to are producing the
intended effect. While program evaluation first focuses around this definition,
important considerations often include how much the program costs per
participant, how the program could be improved, whether the program is
worthwhile, whether there are better alternatives, if there are unintended
outcomes, and whether the program goals are appropriate and useful. [22]
Policy analysis is a technique used in public administration to enable civil
servants, activists, and others to examine and evaluate the available options to
implement the goals of laws and elected officials.

History[edit]
Main article: History of political science
As a social political 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