Political science

Political science is the scientific inspect of politics. this is the a social science dealing with systems of governance & power, & the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.

Modern political science can generally be divided up up into the three subdisciplines of comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. Other notable subdisciplines are public policy and administration, domestic politics and government, political economy, and political methodology. Furthermore, political science is related to, and draws upon, the fields of economics, law, sociology, history, philosophy, human geography, political anthropology, and psychology.

Political science is methodologically diverse and appropriates numerous methods originating in psychology, social research, and political philosophy. Approaches include positivism, interpretivism, rational alternative theory, behaviouralism, structuralism, post-structuralism, realism, institutionalism, and pluralism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquires sought: primary sources, such(a) as historical documents and official records, secondary sources, such(a) as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, experimental research, and model building.

Research methods

Political science is methodologically diverse; political scientists approach the study of politics from a host of different ontological orientations and with a quality of different tools. Because political science is essentially a study of human behaviour, in all aspects of politics, observations in controlled frameworks are often challenging to reproduce or duplicate, though experimental methods are increasingly common see experimental political science. Citing this difficulty, former American Political Science Association President Lawrence Lowell one time said "We are limited by the impossibility of experiment. Politics is an observational, not an experimental science." Because of this, political scientists do historically observed political elites, institutions, and individual or group behaviour in outline to identify patterns, create generalizations, and defining theories of politics.

Like all social sciences, political science faces the difficulty of observing human actors that can only be partially observed and who have the capacity for making conscious choices, unlike other subjects such as non-human organisms in biology or inanimate objects as in physics. Despite the complexities, contemporary political science has progressed by adopting a sort of methods and theoretical approaches to understanding politics, and methodological pluralism is a creation feature of contemporary political science.

Empirical political science methods put the usage of field experiments, surveys and survey experiments, issue studies, process tracing, historical and institutional analysis, ethnography, participant observation, and interview research.

Political scientists also use and develop theoretical tools like game abstraction and agent-based models to study a host of political systems and situations.

Political theorists approach theories of political phenomena with a similar diversity of positions and tools, including Straussian approaches.

Political science may overlap with topics of study that are the traditional focuses of other social sciences—for example, when sociological norms or psychological biases are connected to political phenomena. In these cases, political science may either inherit their methods of study or develop a contrasting approach. For example, Lisa Wedeen has argued that political science's approach to the abstraction of culture, originating with Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba and exemplified by authors like Samuel P. Huntington, could usefulness from aligning more closely with the study of culture in anthropology. In turn, methodologies that are developed within political science may influence how researchers in other fields, like public health, conceive of and approach political processes and policies.