Nature of Political Science

POLITICAL SCIENCE, academic discipline, the focus of which is the systematic study of government in the largest sense, encompassing the origins of political regimes; their structures, functions, and institutions; all the ways in which governments discover and deal with socioeconomic problems—from dog licensing to diplomacy; and the interactions of groups and individuals that play a part in establishing, maintaining, and changing governments.

Nature of the Discipline.

Political science usually is viewed as one of the social sciences, which also include anthropology, economics, history, psychology, and sociology. Its relationship to these disciplines can be seen from two perspectives. Some say that political science occupies a central position because the human and social concerns of the other social sciences must take place within—and be affected by—the political beliefs, practices, and authority that exist everywhere. The opposite view is that political science is the “handmaiden” of the other social sciences because it depends on them for its concepts, methods, and understandings. Whichever side one takes, it remains true that throughout the nearly 100-year history of political science as an academic field, first one and then another of the other social sciences has been seen as the key to comprehension of political matters.

The precursors of political science were concerned with the attainment and securing of ideal ends. Questions about the best form of government are now widely considered outside the scope of the discipline, which is regarded as being concerned not with what ought to be but, rather, with what actually is. Although the question of the ideal usually is placed in the field of political philosophy, some scholars argue that because value questions are implicit in all political inquiry, they need to be squarely faced. Today most published research and formal study in political science deal primarily with tangible topics such as political campaigns and elections, the legislative process, executive power, administrative regulations, tax and welfare policies, international relations, comparative politics, judicial decision making, and the actions and effects of groups involved in business, labor, agriculture, religion, ethnic cultures, the military, and the media.

Early History.

Strong interest in the nature of the state, its organs of control, and the place of the citizenry within its boundaries existed as far back as ancient Greece. Most scholars would agree that Aristotle was the earliest forerunner of the political scientist. Among other things, his treatment of types of regimes in his Politics presaged countless efforts to classify forms of government and has remained a major influence on the discipline. Plato’s Republic, with its theoretical development of a utopia, or perfect city, was another important early work. Over the centuries, other classics of the field were written by the Roman statesman Cicero, by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, by the Italian statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, by the British philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, by the French writers Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Baron de Montesquieu, and by the German philosophers Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. The Federalist (1787–88), a series of essays, most of them by the American statesmen Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, is a classic of early U.S. political thought (see FEDERALIST, THE). Almost all of these authors dealt with the possibility that a society could provide the conditions for a good life for all its people. These works are still read, largely because they go beyond material comfort to treat such higher values as justice, equality, liberty, and the promotion of human excellence.

Development in the U.S.

As an academic discipline, political science is a part of higher-education curricula all over the world, although it is more prevalent in the U.S. than anywhere else. Political science emerged in the U.S. as a separate field of study in the late 19th century. Before then, young American scholars interested in the subject went to European universities for advanced graduate work. The European emphasis on rigorous research, especially in Germany, won many American adherents. On their return to the U.S., these scholars worked to turn the study of government away from what they saw as sterile preoccupation with documents in archives and toward the political activities of actual human beings in everyday life. The fact that real power was frequently quite different from the formal authority set down in written constitutions and statutes was perhaps their main conviction. The new breed of political scientists, often college professors, insisted that a genuine understanding of governments could be gained only through study of the actual process of politics, using careful methods to observe, gather, organize, and explain the facts.

The successes achieved in the natural sciences led many political scientists to the belief that in time, if they borrowed the orderly analysis and methodology of physics, chemistry, and biology, and if they, too, developed explanatory theories, the study of government and politics could become as much a scientific endeavor as were the established laboratory sciences. In their efforts to achieve this scientific credibility, these scholars allied themselves primarily with researchers in the fields of sociology and psychology. From sociologists they borrowed statistical methods of collecting and analyzing data on people’s political behavior. From psychologists they took definitions, propositions, and concepts to help in understanding why human beings act in certain ways. History was used as a source of facts to be analyzed by the political scientist. Economics also was relegated to a supplementary position, although the economists’ ability to collect quantifiable data became the envy of many students of politics. As a result of these borrowings from other social sciences, political science came to be seen as an important field in its own right; no longer was it considered merely an adjunct to the fields of moral philosophy, law, political economy, or history.

Contemporary Political Science.

Despite this early call for a completely realistic and independent discipline based on an objective approach and using the tools of science, the older, library-based, speculative, and normative study of politics remained standard until the mid-20th century, when the scientific approach finally began to dominate the field. The experience of academics who returned to the campus after government service in Washington, D.C., during the New Deal years and later, during World War II, had a profound effect on the entire discipline. Employment in agencies such as the Office of War Information polished their skills in applying the methods of social science, including public opinion surveys, content analysis, statistical techniques, and other means of collecting and systematically analyzing political data. Having seen firsthand how the game of politics is really played, these professors often came back to their research and to college classrooms eager to use these tools to determine precisely who gets political power in a society, why and how they get it, and what they do with it. This movement developed into what has been described as the new orthodoxy of the study of politics.

It came to be called “behavioralism” because its proponents insisted that objective observation and measurement be applied to the full range of human behavior as it manifests itself in the real world. Opponents of behavioralism, although a minority within the discipline, have maintained that there can be no true science of politics. They contend, for example, that any form of experimentation in which all the variables are controlled in a political situation is not legal, ethical, or even possible with human subjects. To this argument, the behavioralists have replied that small increments of systematically gathered knowledge will add up, over time, to broad-gauged theories that can be used to explain human behavior. Some behavioralists developed sophisticated models of human activity to guide their research, frequently drawing on computer technology for concepts as well as hardware.

The widespread study of politics as a system—with “inputs,” “outputs,” and “feedback”—is a major example of the influence of computers on the discipline of political science. Other behavioralists created a burgeoning subfield of policy analysis, which they promoted as an independent discipline. It calls for the mastery of rigorous scientific methods in order to put the policy analysts in a position to judge what would and would not work among the alternatives proposed to cope with public problems. The debate about what political science is or should be continues to the present time. For all the differences that exist concerning methodology and approach, however, no one disputes that the study of government and politics is both proper and necessary. To the extent that the vitality of any scholarly discipline may be measured by how much its members care and argue about what should constitute its core, political science remains vigorous indeed.