Political science
Political science begins with a refusal. It refuses to ask what politics ought to be, and instead asks what politics actually is. Where political philosophy reaches for value judgments, this field reaches for empirical evidence. It studies systems of governance and power. It examines political activity, political thought, political behavior, and the constitutions and laws that surround them. The people who do this work are called political scientists. They favor describing and explaining over moralizing. But this descriptive stance did not arrive fully formed. For most of its history, the study of politics was tangled up with history, with philosophy, with law. So how did it pull itself loose and become a discipline of its own? What happened in the 1950s that one observer called a revolution? And why, decades later, would a movement rise up to push back against the very methods that defined the field?
Into the late 19th century, it was still uncommon for anyone to treat political science as a field distinct from history. The term itself was not always separated from political philosophy. The modern discipline carried a clear set of antecedents: moral philosophy, political economy, political theology, history, and other fields concerned with what ought to be and with the characteristics of the ideal state. Classical political philosophy was defined by a concern for Hellenic and Enlightenment thought. Political scientists added a great concern for modernity and the contemporary nation state. That shift gave them more shared vocabulary with sociologists, including terms like structure and agency. The break became visible in university architecture. Departments and chairs carrying the title of political science arose in the late 19th century. The designation political scientist came to denote someone holding a doctorate or master's degree in the field. Munroe Smith, writing in the inaugural issue of a new journal, defined political science as the science of the state. Taken in that sense, he wrote, it includes the organization and functions of the state, and the relation of states one to another.
The American Political Science Association was founded in 1903, and the American Political Science Review followed in 1906. Both existed to distinguish the study of politics from economics and other social phenomena. Membership numbers tell the story of a field taking hold. APSA counted 204 members in 1904, then 1,462 by 1915. Those members did practical work, setting up political science departments separate from history, philosophy, law, sociology, and economics. The journal Political Science Quarterly had appeared earlier, established in 1886 by the Academy of Political Science. After the Second World War, the discipline went international. As part of a UNESCO initiative to promote political science in the late 1940s, the International Political Science Association was founded in 1949. National associations followed in quick succession: France in 1949, Britain in 1950, and West Germany in 1951. The American body that started it all has grown into the leading professional organization in the field, now serving more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a behavioral revolution swept the discipline, stressing the systematic, rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior. Early behavioral political science focused on studying political behavior rather than institutions or the interpretation of legal texts. The work of Robert Dahl and Philip Converse belonged to this current, as did the collaboration between the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and the public opinion scholar Bernard Berelson. The late 1960s and early 1970s brought a takeoff in deductive, game-theoretic formal modelling, aimed at building a more analytical body of knowledge. Researchers borrowed theory and methods from economics to study institutions like the United States Congress, and behavior like voting. William H. Riker and his colleagues and students at the University of Rochester were the main proponents of this shift. The ambition was large, but the results came with a caveat. Scholars have noted that progress toward systematic theory has been modest and uneven.
In 2000, the Perestroika Movement appeared 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. They also argued for more relevance of the discipline to people outside of it. A different challenge came from evolutionary psychology. Some theories there argue that humans evolved a highly developed set of psychological mechanisms for dealing with politics. The catch is that these mechanisms evolved to handle the small-group politics of the ancestral environment, not the much larger political structures of today's world. This mismatch is argued to explain many features of current politics, including systematic cognitive biases. The tension between mathematical rigor and human relevance never fully resolved, and methodological pluralism became a defining feature of the field.
The 2014 Ukrainian economic and political crisis gave political scientists a test case for one of their harder ambitions: predicting upheaval before it arrives. A statistical indicator was proposed for crisis anticipation, a simultaneous increase of variance and correlations in large groups. In the pre-crisis years, the total correlation between the 19 major public fears in Ukrainian society rose by about 64 percent, while their statistical dispersion rose by 29 percent. Yet prediction has limits. A feature shared by certain major revolutions is that they were not predicted, and a theory of the apparent inevitability of crises and revolutions was also developed. The study of crises does not stop at forecasting regime transitions. Political scientists also study how governments handle unexpected disasters. They study how voters in democracies react to their governments' preparations for and responses to those crises.
We are limited by the impossibility of experiment, said Lawrence Lowell, a former president of the American Political Science Association. Politics is an observational, not an experimental science. That constraint shaped how the field works. Because controlled observations are challenging to reproduce, political scientists have historically watched elites, institutions, and group behavior to find patterns and build theories. Their subjects make conscious choices and can only be partially observed, unlike minerals in geoscience, stars in astronomy, or particles in physics. So the field gathered a wide toolkit instead. Empirical methods include field experiments, surveys and survey experiments, case studies, process tracing, historical and institutional analysis, ethnography, participant observation, and interview research. Theorists work with their own instruments, including feminist political theory, the historical analysis of the Cambridge School, and Straussian approaches. Game theory and agent-based models let researchers study political systems and situations across a wide range. Lisa Wedeen has argued that political science's approach to culture, originating with Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba and exemplified by authors like Samuel P. Huntington, could benefit from aligning more closely with how anthropology studies culture.
Political science occupies a strange address. It has been described as a discipline that lives on the fault line between the two cultures in the academy, the sciences and the humanities. In most American colleges, especially liberal arts colleges, it sits within the school or college of arts and sciences. At some research universities with a strong applied emphasis in public administration, it is taught by the university's public policy school instead. The name itself shifts by place and era. The term political science is more popular in post-1960s North America than elsewhere. Universities predating the 1960s, or those shaped by them, would call the field government. Institutions outside the United States often see it as part of a broader discipline of political studies or politics. Most United States colleges and universities offer BA programs, with MA and PhD programs common at larger ones. For students of government and politics in the United States, the main national honor society is Pi Sigma Alpha. For those in public administration, a separate honor society exists: Pi Alpha Alpha.
Common questions
What is political science and how does it differ from political philosophy?
Political science is the field that studies the scientific aspect of politics, covering systems of governance and power, political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws. Unlike political philosophy, which is primarily normative and evaluates politics through value judgments, political science emphasizes description and explanation and favors empirical evidence over ethical judgements.
When did political science emerge as a distinct academic discipline?
Political science emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the late 19th century, influenced by the rise of empiricism and positivism. It separated itself from history, philosophy, and law during a period of university professionalization, with departments and chairs carrying the title of political science arising in the late 19th century.
When was the American Political Science Association founded?
The American Political Science Association was founded in 1903, and the American Political Science Review followed in 1906. APSA membership rose from 204 in 1904 to 1,462 in 1915, and it now serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries.
What was the behavioral revolution in political science?
The behavioral revolution was a shift in the 1950s and 1960s that stressed the systematic, rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior. It focused on political behavior rather than institutions or legal texts, and included work by Robert Dahl, Philip Converse, and the collaboration between Paul Lazarsfeld and Bernard Berelson.
What research methods do political scientists use?
Political scientists use empirical methods including field experiments, surveys and survey experiments, case studies, process tracing, historical and institutional analysis, ethnography, participant observation, and interview research. They also develop theoretical tools such as game theory and agent-based models, and methodological pluralism is a defining feature of the field.
What was the Perestroika Movement in political science?
The Perestroika Movement was introduced in 2000 as a reaction against what its supporters called the mathematicization of political science. Its supporters argued for a plurality of methodologies and approaches and for more relevance of the discipline to people outside of it.
All sources
48 references cited across the entry
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