A general outlook on political science

Yanmei Ye

A general outlook on political science

Opinion Article - (2022) Volume 16, Issue 2

^*Correspondence: Yanmei Ye, Department of Government and Public Administration, University of Macau, Zhuhai, China, Email:

Author information

Department of Government and Public Administration, University of Macau, Zhuhai, China

Received: 27-May-2022, Manuscript No. AJPS-22-66802; Editor assigned: 30-May-2022, Pre QC No. AJPS-22-66802 (PQ); Reviewed: 15-Jun-2022, QC No. AJPS-22-66802; Revised: 21-Jun-2022, Manuscript No. AJPS-22-66802 (R); Published: 29-Jun-2022

Description

Political science is a social science that studies power structures, political ideologies, political conduct, and the laws and constitutions that go along with them. Comparative politics, international relations, and political theory are the three main sub disciplines of contemporary political science. Public policy and administration, domestic politics and governance, political economy, and political methodology are additional noteworthy fields. The disciplines of economics, law, sociology, history, philosophy, human geography, political anthropology, and psychology are also connected to and influenced by political science.

Political science employs a wide range of methodologies, including those from psychology, social science, and political philosophy. Positivism, interpretivism, rational choice theory, behaviorism, structuralism, post-structuralism, realism, institutionalism, and pluralism are some of the methodologies (Arceneaux, et al. 2021). Political science, as one of the social sciences, employs approaches and strategies appropriate to the types of inquiries being made, including primary sources like official records and historical documents, secondary sources like scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, experimental research, and model development (Bacigalupe, et al. 2010).

Political scientists approach the study of politics from a wide range of distinct ontological orientations and with a number of different tools. Political science is methodologically diverse. In all aspects of politics, observations in controlled situations are frequently difficult to recreate or duplicate since political science is fundamentally the study of human behavior, even though experimental approaches are becoming more and more popular (Dauenhauer, et al. 2019). Lawrence Lowell, a former president of the American Political Science Association, once noted this challenge by stating, “We are limited by the impossibility of experiment (Faul, et al. 2007). Politics is not an experimental science; it is an observational one. In order to spot trends, make generalizations, and develop theories of politics, political scientists have historically observed political elites, institutions, and individual or group behavior.

Political science, like all social sciences, has trouble studying human actors since they may make conscious decisions and can only be partially observed, unlike other disciplines like non-human organisms in biology or inanimate things in physics (Geana, et al. 2021). Despite the complexity, modern political science has advanced by incorporating a range of techniques and theoretical frameworks to comprehend politics; methodological diversity is a distinctive aspect of modern political science (Jost, et al. 2003). To examine a variety of political systems and events, political scientists also create and employ theoretical tools like agent-based models and game theory. When sociological norms or psychological biases are linked to political phenomena, for example, political science may research themes that are traditionally the focus of other social sciences. In these situations, political science could adopt their research techniques or adopt a different strategy.

Political science can be defined as “a discipline which lives on the fault line between the ‘two cultures’ in the academy, the sciences and the humanities,” presumably similar to the social sciences as a whole (Matthews, et al. 2017). As a result, political science may be a separate department housed as part of a division or school of humanities or liberal arts in some American schools where there isn’t a separate school or college of arts and sciences per se. Political scientists share more terminology with sociologists than with classical political philosophy, which is primarily marked by a concern for Hellenic and Enlightenment thought (Weinstock, 2011). Political scientists, however, are also marked by a great concern for “modernity” and the contemporary nation state, along with the study of classical thought.