Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.
Formally political science is thought to be sort of this systematic study of the theories and practices of government but functionally and this is what we hear much more often political science is really the study of who gets what, when, where and how.
I think this is much more helpful because it gives us a sense of really how political science is sort of different from some of the other related social sciences, so say in contrast to sociology or anthropology or even psychology. Political science is really at its core this study of power and resources and the distribution of power and resources within societies of people within governments and institutions.
Both formal and informal across countries and even globally and, I think that the sub disciplines of political science really kind of play this out pretty. well, so in American politics for example, we have political scientists who study things like judicial appointments at the federal level and they study campaign financing even within the context of local or municipal level elections. The might look at on incarceration rates within states or race relations across the country over time in a different sub-discipline of of political science and one that's called international relations where we really look at the interaction of countries around the world.
We can see political scientists study things like foreign policy decision-making and human rights of vulnerable populations conflict both military conflict and economic. conflict and nuclear proliferation treaties and even peacekeeping missions around the similarly in comparative politics, and this is where we can kind of take a more historical contextual deep dive into specific countries or specific sets of countries looking at themes and issues and problems that are experienced, within those regions and we can look at things like forced migration or the outcome of political protests and in really rich and interesting ways and it's important to remember too that political science is a science and that means that as political scientists.
we get to use all kinds of methods to explore our topics of interest so, it goes beyond just sort of conjecture or opinion we really get to systematically examine sort of our areas of interest using things like statistics or network analysis or survey data and we can even go into the field and collect qualitative data to inform case studies and it goes beyond just that the the study of political science.
I think that it goes into the application of political science and we can use it as researchers and analysts we could use it as lawyers and as international Development practitioners heads of nonprofits or multilateral institutions. Even as for diplomats in the Foreign Service and so the lane of the discipline is really very wide