What exactly is Political Science?

Governmental institutions. To this day, the most frequent and most popular way of describing the field of political science is as the study of governmental or political institutions (Bentley 1908; Truman 1951)

Women’s Vote
Soon the entire country will be casting their vote in the next presidential election, but it won’t even be 100 years since we were all able to do so.

Yet it is the least useful, since it leaves almost entirely to intuition the sorting of political institutions from all other kinds.

Over 100 years after it was founded, women were still denied the right to vote at the federal level by the government despite mass protests.

It wasn’t until Congress voted on the measure in 1920 which granted the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In another interesting political fact,

the vote was so close it all came down to a critical juncture in the Tennessee capitol. In a second interesting fact: the U.S. was not the first nation to grant women the right to vote.

Two’s the Limit
As recent events have shown us, when a ruler is in power for decades, nothing short of a civil protest can unseat him. However, during the FDR administration, this almost came to pass. After his successive four term stint as president from 1933 to 1945

the 22nd amendment to the Constitution was quickly passed which banned any future presidents from serving for more than two terms

As the basic conceptualization of the field, it begs the vital question. It does not help us to distinguish governmental or political institutions from other kinds.

We are left as much in the dark about the subject matter of political science as ever, that is, at the mercy of our intuitions

The folks at the International Debate Education Association have more on the pro’s and con’s to this political science fact.

This way of orienting oneself to political research virtually abdicates all responsibility for elevating the theoretical level of the discipline.

Just what is to be included within it must rest on the emergent but undefined consensus of each generation of political scientists.

First Political Debate
When did political science become such a dog and pony show? It was probably long before the United States was ever conceived but one of the landmarks could certainly be September 26,

1960 or when the first televised presidential debate was held. Watch as then Senator John F. Kennedy takes on incumbent President Nixon who actually turns down opportunities to refute points made by the opposition.

The state. No conceptualization of the subject matter of political science has had a longer history than that of the “state.”

Its origins as a way of orienting political inquiry lie buried in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Machiavelli is often cited as one of the first known users of the term, but his invention of it is disputable.

Civil Rights Act of 1964
Although it had been one hundred years since the Civil War, there was still massive unrest in the Southern part of the United States

However, during these centuries it slowly emerged as a substitute for earlier terms to refer to important political entities, such as kingdom, land, principality, commonwealth, republic, dominion, and empire (Ma-clver 1926).

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of several in an attempt to help African Americans achieve the same success as their white counterparts. Tom Woods has more interesting political science facts on the act and the fall out on his blog.

The state’s long tradition as a central political concept testifies more to the persistence of practical political interests in setting research perspectives than to the utility of the idea for understanding political life.

Emperor Constantine Converts to Christianity
The subject of books and films alike, the conversion of this Roman emperor is one of the most interesting facts in political history.

In fact, its shortcomings for theoretical purposes have become so widely recognized since World War ii that its professional use has dwindled to a small fraction of its previous frequency (Easton 1953).

A few hundred years after the coming of Christ, his followers were still present in Rome and growing in numbers. The Romans widely took to persecution, which included live executions

For research and analytic purposes, scholars have denuded the term of most of its implication; it has been reduced simply to a neutral and empty conceptual shell for identifying the actors in the international sphere.