What exactly is Political Science?

The major subfields are reviewed in the entries International law; International relations; Political behavior; Political theory; Politics, comparative; Public administration; Public law.

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. 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.

Political science in mid-twentieth century is a discipline in search of its identity.

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

Through the efforts to solve this identity crisis it has begun to show evidence of emerging as an autonomous and independent discipline with a systematic theoretical structure of its own.

” 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.

The factor that has contributed most to this end has been the reception and integration of the methods of science into the core of the discipline.

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.

The long failure of political science to assert a fundamental coherence of subject matter led some scholars to deny that it could ever form an autonomous field of research coordinate with other social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

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

They would rather assign it to the category of an applied field, one in which the theoretical concepts formed in the other social sciences are applied in the study of political institutions.

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.

But this assessment of the theoretical status of political science is largely a result of the failure to perceive the profound revolution that has taken place in the discipline, especially since World War II.

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.

In these decades political science has taken some firm and well-articulated steps toward its own reconstruction as a theoretical discipline.

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.

During the many centuries from classical antiquity almost to the end of the nineteenth century, the study of political life remained not a discipline in the strict sense but a congeries of inherited interests.

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.

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

Only in retrospect, when modern criteria are imposed upon the thought of past social philosophers, is it possible to identify their intellectual concerns as indeed part of what today we choose to call political science.

As a result, by the time political science took shape as an independent academic discipline, it had assumed a thoroughly synthetic character; its subject matter appeared to consist largely of a collection of loosely related topics handed down and modified through the ages.

It wasn’t until 313 AD that Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Man, which commanded the official toleration of Christianity and other religions. He would also convert to the religion himself.

On the surface, all that seemed to draw these interests together was their relationship to some vaguely defined political institutions and practices.