Political Science is systematic study of and reflection upon politics. Politics usually describes the processes by which people and institutions exercise and resist power. Political processes are used to formulate policies, influence individuals and institutions, and organize societies.

Many political scientists study how governments use politics. But political scientists also study politics in other contexts, such as how politics affects the economy, how ordinary people think and act in relation to politics, and how politics influences organizations outside of government. The emphasis upon government and power distinguishes political science from other social sciences, although political scientists share an interest with economists in studying relations between the government and economy, and with sociologists in considering relations between social structures in general and political structures in particular. Political scientists attempt to explain and understand recurrent patterns in politics rather than specific political events.

Political science is important because politics is important. During the 20th century, tens of millions of people were murdered by regimes devoted to particular political ideologies. All peoples’ lives are affected in many ways by what governments do or choose not to do, and by the power structures that exist in society.

The specific ideas of political scientists are only occasionally implemented by policy makers. Political scientists usually influence the world in more indirect ways: by educating citizens and political leaders, by contributing to debates on political issues, and by encouraging different ways of looking at the world. The study of political science is motivated by the need to understand the sources and consequences of political stability and revolution, of repression and liberty, of equality and inequality, of war and peace, of democracy and dictatorship. The study of political science suggests that the world of politics is complex and cannot be reorganized by simple ideological schemes without unintended consequences.

What Political Scientists Do

Most professional political scientists work in colleges and universities where they teach, conduct research, and write articles and books related to their specific research interests. Political scientists also work in policy-related think tanks, privately funded organizations that conduct and publicize research on public policy issues. Examples of such organizations include The Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. Political parties and survey-research organizations frequently employ political scientists to design and interpret opinion surveys. Businesses employ political scientists to provide information on the political contexts in which corporations operate. Governments employ political scientists as assistants to legislators, as staff members of administrative departments such as the United States Department of State, and in international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). Some political scientists become politicians or journalists. One political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, became president of the United States.

FIELDS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Political science is organized into several fields, each representing a major subject area of teaching and research in colleges and universities. These fields include comparative politics, American politics, international relations, political theory, public administration, public policy, and political behavior.

A  Comparative Politics

Comparative politics involves study of the politics of different countries. Some political scientists, known as area specialists, study a single country or a culturally similar group of nations, such as the countries of Southeast Asia. Area specialists tend to be versed in the language, history, and culture of the country or group of countries they study. Other political scientists compare culturally dissimilar nations, and investigate the similarities and differences in the politics of these nations. Political scientists who undertake these comparisons are often motivated by the need to develop and test theories—for example, theories of why revolutions happen. This may lead them to discover commonalities between countries that are widely separated and appear very different. For example, political scientists have found many similarities between the transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.

B  American Politics

Research institutions in most of the world classify American politics as a subfield of comparative politics. However, political scientists usually organize the study of their own country into a separate field, so within the United States, American politics is recognized as its own specialty. Given the size of the United States and the number of students who study U.S. politics in colleges and universities, the American politics subfield is very large. Political scientists interested in American politics often study the Congress of the United States, judicial politics, constitutional law, the presidency, state and local politics, voting and elections, and American political history.

C  International Relations

International relations is the study of the international system, which involves interactions between nations, international organizations, and multinational corporations. The two traditional approaches used by political scientists in the study of international relations are realism and liberalism (which is not the same as liberalism as a political ideology). Realism emphasizes the danger of the international system, where war is always a possibility and the only source of order is the balance of power. Liberalism is more idealistic and hopeful, emphasizing the problem-solving abilities of international institutions such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization. In 1991, after the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended, the balance of opinion briefly shifted in favor of liberalism, but realists were quick to point to the potential for future international conflicts.

Beginning in the 1980s constructivist political scientists asserted that the interests of nations and the character of their interactions are not fixed, but can be determined by policy makers. For example, for the past 50 years, U.S. policy makers have constructed the identity of Canada and Cuba in quite different ways. In spite of the fact that Canada and the United States were rivals in the early part of their history, during the 20th century the U.S. has established military and economic alliances with Canada and regards it as a close ally. In contrast, since Cuba’s 1959 revolution and subsequent adoption of Communist principles, the United States has treated Cuba as a potential threat to American national security. Many European nations and allies of the United States believe this fear is unwarranted. According to constructivist political scientists, the identities that U.S. policy makers have constructed for countries like Canada and Cuba help to determine whether the fears of realists or the hopes of liberals are more likely to be realized.

D  Political Theory

Political theory involves the study of philosophical thought about politics from ancient Greece to the present; the interpretation and development of concepts such as freedom, democracy, human rights, justice, and power; the development of models for government, such as participatory democracy or constitutional systems; and the logic that political scientists use in their inquiries. Political theory overlaps law, philosophy, and the other fields of political science. In 1971 John Rawls, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published A Theory of Justice, which revitalized political theory. Rawls’s book showed that it was still possible to generate sophisticated and challenging philosophical arguments about the way that political systems should be organized, and that political scientists should not just look to the ideas of the great philosophers of the past.

E  Public Administration

Political scientists interested in public administration study government organizations and their relation to other parts of government. Political scientists investigate how these organizations work, and try to devise methods of improving them. For example, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s book Reinventing Government (1992) inspired many national, state, and local governments to adopt more-competitive and less bureaucratic ways of delivering services to the public.

F  Public Policy

The field of public policy involves the study of specific policy problems and governmental responses to them. Political scientists involved in the study of public policy attempt to devise solutions for problems of public concern. They study issues such as health care, pollution, and the economy. Public policy overlaps comparative politics in the study of comparative public policy; with international relations in the study of foreign policy and national security policy; and with political theory in considering ethics in policy making.

G  Political Behavior

Political behavior involves the study of how people involve themselves in political processes and respond to political activity. The field emphasizes the study of voting behavior, which can be affected by social pressures; the effects of individual psychology, such as emotional attachments to parties or leaders; and the rational self-interests of voters. The results of these studies are applied during the planning of political campaigns, and influence the design of advertisements and party platforms.

RECENT TRENDS

During the late 20th century the American practice of the discipline has become dominant worldwide. The analytical methods favored by the behaviorists continue to influence political scientists, who have developed rational choice theory to predict and explain the behavior of people when they interact in a political context. Political scientists have also reconsidered some of the most basic building blocks of society, such as the state and the institutions it comprises.

A  Rational Choice Theory

The latest initiative to make political science more self-consciously scientific involves the use of rational choice theory, which attempts to deduce what will happen when individuals are faced with a political situation. The theory borrows from economics the assumption that all individuals are rational egoists. People are assumed to be rational in their capacity to devise, choose, and put into practice effective means to clear ends; they are egoists because the ends in question generally refer to the self-interest of that individual. Rational choice theory can be applied to everything from decisions made by small committees to complex negotiations between governments.

Rational choice theory has proven limited in its ability to predict real-world behavior. For example, rational choice theory cannot explain why intelligent people vote in elections when the chances of their vote being decisive in determining the winner of the election are near zero. Some observers believe that the results of rational choice theory are best thought of as a set of warnings about what would happen if people behaved as rational egoists, rather than an explanation of how the world actually works.

B  New Institutionalism

New institutionalists have reinvigorated the study of institutions. In political science, institutions can be defined as systems of formal rules or informal understandings that coordinate the actions of individuals. Examples of institutions include the U.S. Congress and global agreements that seek to limit damage to the earth’s ozone layer. New institutionalists claim that the behavioral revolution of the 1950s led political scientists to overemphasize the behavior of individuals, to the neglect of the institutional contexts in which these individuals operate. New institutionalists claim to have more-sophisticated theories about how institutions work than did the “old” institutionalists of the early 20th century.

C  Return of the State

From the 19th century to the 1940s many political scientists regarded the state as a unified, organic entity that integrated government, society, and political organizations. During the behavioral revolution, this concept of a unified, goal-directed state was discredited, in favor of a looser and more open concept of the political system. Behaviorists contended that the idea of the state was unscientific and mocked it as mystical. They claimed that political systems, in contrast, are real and observable, composed of various inputs and outputs. According to the behaviorists, the inputs in a political system include influences such as lobbying by interest groups and bargaining between the executive and legislative branches, and the outputs are public policies.

The concept of the state, now more precisely defined as the set of officials legally authorized to make binding decisions for a society, made a comeback in the 1980s. States are viewed as having certain functions or imperatives that they must perform—for example, maintaining the confidence of financial markets—regardless of the desires of their political leaders, the wishes of voters, pressure from interest groups, or bargaining within government.

D  Democracy and Democratization

During the 1980s and 1990s increasing numbers of political scientists studied democracy and its development in societies that had formerly been ruled by authoritarian governments. The wave of democratization that followed the end of the Cold War inspired political theorists to develop new models of democracy, and political scientists to study the role of citizenship and citizen education in democratic governments.

E  Challenges to the Discipline

Marxists challenged conventional political science through most of the 20th century, charging that the discipline overlooked oppressive political relationships in the capitalist economy. According to Marxists, formal democracy is a sham because the dominant economic class in society always controls the government.

Since 1970 feminism has influenced most fields of political science. Feminist critics contend that both governments and political science have been organized along male-dominated lines and have ignored and repressed the perspective of women. Political scientists’ responses to feminism have ranged from attempts to study the political behavior of women more closely to the development of comprehensive feminist political philosophies.