Political Science

Political science is a social science which deals with systems of government, and the analysis of political activities, political thoughts and political behavior. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics which is commonly thought of as determining of the distribution of power and resources. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions, and from these revelations they attempt to construct general principles about the way the world of politics works."

Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, experimental research and model building.

Approaches include:

• Positivism - a philosophical theory stating that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations.
• Interpretivism - a concept and a method central to a rejection of positivistic social science.
• Rational Choice Theory - a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior.
• Behavioralism - seeks to examine the behavior, actions, and acts of individuals – rather than the characteristics of institutions such as legislatures, executives, and judiciaries – and groups in different social settings and explain this behavior as it relates to the political system.
• Structuralism - the methodology that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
• Post-Structuralism - the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.
• Realism - the belief that some aspects of reality are ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc.
• Institutionalism - uses institutions to find sequences of social, political, economic behavior and change across time. It is a comparative approach to the study of all aspects of human organizations and does so by relying heavily on case studies.