Political science (sometimes abbreviated as poli sci) is a field which aims to study the scientific aspect of politics. It deals with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws. Specialists in the field are political scientists. Unlike political philosophy, which is primarily normative and evaluates politics through value judgments, political science emphasizes descriptive and explanatory means of articulating what is (the de facto, status quo, lex non scripta, etc.) and favors empirical evidence over ethical judgements. Political science emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the late 19th century, influenced by the rise of empiricism and positivism. It emerged from history, philosophy, and law amid university professionalization and the founding of bodies such as the American Political Science Association in 1903. The behavioral revolution of the 1950s played a significant role in shifting emphasis to scientifically explaining human behavior from an unbiased and neutral point of view using quantitative research methods such as surveys, historical analysis, and empirical testing.
History
Origin As a social science, contemporary political science started to take shape in the latter half of the 19th century and began to separate itself from political philosophy and history. Into the late 19th century, it was still uncommon for political science to be considered a distinct field from history. The term "political science" was not always distinguished from political philosophy, and the modern discipline has a clear set of antecedents including 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.
Generally, while 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 more terminology with sociologists (e.g., structure and agency).
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. The designation "political scientist" is commonly used to denote someone with a doctorate or master's degree in the field. 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, to distinguish the study of politics from economics and other social phenomena. APSA membership rose from 204 in 1904 to 1,462 in 1915. APSA members played a key role in setting up political science departments that were distinct from history, philosophy, law, sociology, and economics.The journal Political Science Quarterly was established in 1886 by the Academy of Political Science. In the inaugural issue of Political Science Quarterly, Munroe Smith defined political science as "the science of the state. Taken in this sense, it includes the organization and functions of the state, and the relation of states one to another."
As part of a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiative to promote political science in the late 1940s, the International Political Science Association was founded in 1949, along with national associations in France in 1949, Britain in 1950, and West Germany in 1951.
Founded in 1903, the American Political Science Association (APSA) is the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries.
Behavioral revolution and new institutionalism In the 1950s and 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic, 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 takeoff 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 types of scholarship discussed above, scholars have noted that progress toward systematic theory has been modest and uneven.Kim Quaile Hill, "In Search of General Theory", Journal of Politics 74 (October 2012), 917–31.
21st century In 2000, the Perestroika Movement in political science was introduced as a reaction against what its supporters 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.
Some evolutionary psychology theories argue that humans have evolved a highly developed set of psychological mechanisms for dealing with politics. However, these mechanisms evolved to deal with the small-group politics that characterized the ancestral environment, not the much larger political structures of today's world. This is argued to explain many important features and systematic cognitive biases in current politics.Michael Bang Petersen. "The evolutionary psychology of mass politics". In
Overview 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 behaviour, and public policies. It measures 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 theses (which attempt to describe how things are, as opposed to how they should be) by analysing politics; others advance normative theses, such as by making specific policy recommendations. The study of politics and policies can be closely connected—for example, through comparative analyses of which political institutions tend to produce certain policies. Political science provides analysis and predictions about political and governmental issues. Political scientists examine the processes, systems, and political dynamics of countries and regions of the world, often to raise public awareness or to influence specific governments.
Political scientists may provide the frameworks from which journalists, special interest groups, politicians, and the electorate analyze issues.
Country-specific studies Political scientists may study political phenomena within one specific country. For example, they may study the politics of the United States or the politics of China.
Political scientists look at a variety of data, including constitutions, elections, public opinion, and public policy, foreign policy, legislatures, and judiciaries. Political scientists will often focus on the politics of their own country; for example, a political scientist from Indonesia may become an expert in the politics of Indonesia.
Anticipating crises The theory of political transitions,Acemoglu D., Robinson J.A. "A theory of political transitions." American Economic Review. 2001 Sep 1:938–63. and the methods of analyzing and anticipating crises,McClelland C.A. "The Anticipation of International Crises: Prospects for Theory and Research." International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, Special Issue on International Crisis: Progress and Prospects for Applied Forecasting and Management (March 1977), pp. 15–38 form an important part of political science. Several general indicators of crises and methods for anticipating critical transitions were proposed.Scheffer M., Carpenter S.R., Lenton T.M., et al. "Anticipating critical transitions." Science. 2012 Oct 19; 338(6105):344–48. Among them, one statistical indicator of crisis, a simultaneous increase of variance and correlations in large groups, was proposed for crisis anticipation and may be 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 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 the apparent inevitability of crises and revolutions was also developed.Kuran T. "Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution." Public Choice, Vol. 61, No. 1 (April 1989), pp. 41–74
The study of major crises, both political and external, is not limited to attempts to predict regime transitions or major changes in political institutions. Political scientists also study how governments handle unexpected disasters, and how voters in democracies react to their governments' preparations for and responses to crises.
Research methods
Research methods
Political science is methodologically diverse and appropriates many methods originating in psychology, social research, political philosophy, and many others, in addition to those that developed chiefly within the field of political science.
Political scientists approach the study of politics from a host of different ontological orientations and with a variety of different tools. 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). 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."Lowell, A. Lawrence. 1910. "The Physiology of Politics ." American Political Science Review 4: 1–15. Because of this, political scientists have historically observed political elites, institutions, and individual or group behaviour 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, minerals in geoscience, chemical elements in chemistry, stars in astronomy, or particles in physics. Despite its complexities, contemporary political science has advanced by adopting a variety of methods and theoretical approaches to understanding politics, and methodological pluralism is a defining feature of the field.