What Is Political Science? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Political science is the systematic study of government, power, and political behavior — who governs, how authority is gained and exercised, how collective decisions get made, and why. It examines formal institutions (constitutions, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies), informal political behavior (voting, public opinion, protest, political parties), and the ideas that justify or challenge different arrangements of power. The name is a 19th-century coinage reflecting the discipline’s ambition, inherited from the same positivist current that produced “social science” more broadly: to study politics with the same empirical rigor applied to the natural sciences, rather than treating it purely as a branch of moral philosophy or history.

Political science is frequently confused with political commentary, punditry, or activism, but the three are not the same thing. Political science is an empirical discipline — political scientists build and test theories about institutions and behavior using data, formal models, and systematic comparison, and a great deal of the field is explicitly positive (describing and explaining what is and why) rather than normative (prescribing what ought to be). Normative political theory is itself a legitimate and long-standing subfield within the discipline, but it operates under different standards of argument than empirical political science, and the two are usually taught and evaluated separately.

What political science actually studies

Political scientists organize their questions around a few recurring, foundational concerns that cut across the discipline’s subfields:

• Power and authority. Who holds the capacity to make binding decisions for a group, how that capacity is acquired (elections, inheritance, force, delegation), and what makes its exercise legitimate in the eyes of those governed.
• Institutions. The formal and informal rules that structure political life — constitutions, electoral systems, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, federal arrangements — and how the design of those rules shapes outcomes (why a proportional-representation system produces a different party landscape than a first-past-the-post one, for example).
• Political behavior. Why individuals vote the way they do (or don’t vote at all), how public opinion forms and shifts, how political identity and partisanship develop, and how collective action — protest, social movements, interest-group mobilization — succeeds or fails.
• Conflict and cooperation between states. Why wars start and end, how alliances and international institutions form and hold (or don’t), and what explains patterns of cooperation, trade, and conflict in a system with no central global authority.
• Distribution of resources and rights. How political processes decide who gets what — public goods, welfare provisions, regulatory protections — and how those decisions interact with economic structure.

A recurring methodological tension runs through the field: politics is, in the discipline’s own phrase, “an observational, not an experimental science” — researchers usually cannot randomly assign countries to different electoral systems or randomly start and stop wars to isolate cause from effect. Much of political science methodology exists specifically to address that constraint: through natural and field experiments where they’re ethically and practically available, through careful comparative case selection, and through statistical techniques designed to approximate causal inference from observational data.

How political science developed as a modern discipline

Political thought is ancient — Aristotle’s Politics and centuries of subsequent political philosophy predate the discipline by millennia — but political science as a distinct, professionalized academic field is a product of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In the United States, the American Political Science Association (APSA), founded in 1903 at Tulane University, played a central role in separating the systematic study of government from its parent disciplines of history, philosophy, law, and economics, establishing it as a field with its own departments, journals, and professional standards.

The discipline’s methods shifted substantially over the 20th century. The behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s pushed political science toward the systematic, quantitative study of individual and group political behavior — voting patterns, public opinion, elite decision-making — modeled on methods borrowed from psychology and sociology, and away from an older tradition centered on formal-legal description of institutions. That shift was itself contested: the Perestroika movement, which emerged publicly around 2000, pushed back against what its proponents saw as an over-reliance on formal mathematical modeling and quantitative technique at the expense of historical, interpretive, and qualitative approaches, arguing for genuine methodological pluralism within the discipline rather than a single dominant paradigm. Both currents remain visible in how political science departments organize themselves today — most retain a mix of quantitative, qualitative, and formal-theoretic faculty rather than committing exclusively to one approach.

Major subfields of political science

Political science departments and the discipline’s professional associations generally organize the field into a small number of recognized subfields, though the boundaries between them are porous and a great deal of research sits at their intersections:

• Comparative politics. Studies political institutions and behavior within and across countries other than (or in addition to) the researcher’s own — comparing electoral systems, party systems, regime types (democracy, authoritarianism, and the many hybrid forms between them), and the conditions under which democratization or democratic backsliding occurs. Comparative politics is defined by its method as much as its subject: systematic cross-case comparison is the discipline’s core analytic tool.
• International relations (IR). Examines interactions between states and other international actors (international organizations, multinational corporations, non-state armed groups) — war and peace, diplomacy, international trade and finance, international law, and global governance. Major theoretical traditions within IR include realism (states as self-interested actors operating in an anarchic system), liberalism (institutions and interdependence can produce durable cooperation), and constructivism (ideas, identities, and norms shape state interests, not just material power).
• American politics / domestic politics and government. Focuses on the institutions, processes, and behavior of a single political system in depth — in the US context, Congress, the presidency, the courts, federalism, elections, and political parties. Equivalent subfields exist within other national political-science traditions, focused on their own systems.
• Political theory (political philosophy). The discipline’s normative and historical subfield — examining foundational concepts like justice, liberty, equality, rights, and legitimate authority, both through close reading of historical texts (Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Rawls) and through contemporary normative argument about how political life ought to be organized.
• Public administration and public policy. Studies how policy is actually designed, implemented, and evaluated by bureaucracies and governments once a decision has been made — the operational and organizational side of governing, and the analytic tools (cost-benefit analysis, program evaluation) used to assess whether policies achieve their stated goals. This subfield overlaps substantially with dedicated schools of public policy and public administration, which are often organizationally distinct from political science departments even where the scholarship is closely related.
• Political economy. Sits at the boundary with economics, studying how political institutions and processes shape economic outcomes (and vice versa) — the politics of trade policy, taxation, regulation, and redistribution, and how economic interests shape political behavior and institutional design.
• Political methodology. A subfield in its own right, developing and refining the statistical, formal, experimental, and computational methods the rest of the discipline uses — causal inference techniques for observational data, game-theoretic modeling, text-as-data methods, and survey methodology.

How political science relates to neighboring disciplines

Political science sits at a genuine crossroads of the social sciences and humanities, and the disciplinary boundaries are worth being precise about:

• Sociology. Both fields study collective human behavior and social structure, but political science centers specifically on power, governance, and formal political institutions, while sociology takes a broader view of social organization, group behavior, and social stratification generally. Political sociology is an explicit area of overlap studied by scholars in both departments.
• Economics. Political economy is a shared subfield, and both disciplines increasingly borrow methodological tools from each other (game theory, econometric causal-inference techniques). The core distinction is one of emphasis: economics centers on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services under scarcity, while political science centers on the allocation of power and authority — even where, as in the study of regulation or redistribution, the two questions are deeply intertwined.
• Psychology. Political psychology, a genuine cross-disciplinary subfield, draws directly on psychology’s methods and theories to study political attitude formation, partisan identity, persuasion, and the cognitive and affective biases that shape political judgment.
• History and law. Political science shares deep historical roots with both fields. Constitutional and comparative-institutional scholarship draws heavily on legal analysis, and much of comparative politics and international relations is grounded in detailed historical case knowledge — the discipline’s own founding, per APSA’s history, was substantially a matter of carving a distinct empirical field out of what had previously been studied as history, philosophy, and law together.
• Anthropology. Where political science tends toward systematic comparison and generalizable theory, anthropology’s ethnographic tradition emphasizes deep, situated understanding of a single political or social context from within. Political anthropology and comparative politics converge on shared questions — the anthropology of the state, informal governance, and local political authority — using largely complementary methods.

The research-funding landscape for political science

Political science research in the United States draws on a narrower, more concentrated set of funders than fields like biomedicine, which matters directly for how researchers and research offices should frame proposals:

• National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF is the principal federal funder of basic political science research in the US. Political science sits within NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences (SES), through the dedicated Political Science Program, which supports basic research across the discipline’s subfields — American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political methodology, and formal theory — on the standard NSF single-investigator and collaborative grant model, evaluated against the agency’s Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts criteria used across all NSF directorates.
• Department of Defense — Minerva Research Initiative. A DoD-funded, university-administered program supporting basic social-science research relevant to national security, including work by political scientists and international-relations scholars on topics such as conflict, deterrence, and state stability. It funds academically rigorous basic research rather than classified or applied defense work, and is a genuinely distinct funding channel from NSF for security-adjacent political science.
• State Department and other federal agencies. Federal agencies with an international-affairs or area-studies mission (the State Department’s own research and area-studies programs, and Title VI-funded National Resource Centers administered through the Department of Education for language and area studies) provide additional, more targeted funding relevant to international relations and comparative politics scholars, though these are generally narrower and more mission-specific than NSF’s basic-research support.
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). NEH occasionally funds work in political theory and the history of political thought, since that subfield sits closer to textual and historical humanities scholarship than to empirical social science — a political theorist working on the history of a concept like sovereignty or republicanism may have a genuine case for NEH funding that an empirical comparativist would not.
• Private foundations. Foundation funding for political science tends to be thematic rather than covering the discipline broadly. The Russell Sage Foundation is a notable funder of behavioral and social-science research relevant to political scientists working on inequality, immigration, and political behavior. Foundations with an international-affairs or peace-and-security focus fund selected international relations and comparative politics work, though researchers should verify current program priorities directly with each foundation rather than assuming continuity, since thematic foundation priorities shift more frequently than federal program structures.

For researchers and research offices building a funding case, the practical implication is that the subfield matters as much as the discipline: a domestic political-behavior or institutions proposal fits NSF SES most naturally, a security- or conflict-focused international relations project has a real case for Minerva or a security-focused foundation, and a normative or historical political-theory project may be better suited to NEH or a humanities-oriented foundation than to NSF at all.

Research methods and tools

Political science methodology spans a genuinely wide range, reflecting the discipline’s mix of quantitative, qualitative, and formal-theoretic traditions:

• Quantitative and statistical analysis. Regression-based causal-inference techniques (including quasi-experimental designs such as difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity, used to approximate experimental comparison from observational data), large-N cross-national statistical analysis, and survey research remain the discipline’s dominant empirical toolkit, particularly in American politics and comparative politics.
• Field and survey experiments. Where random assignment is ethically and logistically feasible — testing how different campaign messages affect turnout, or how information affects political trust — political scientists increasingly use randomized field and survey experiments to establish causal effects more directly than observational methods allow.
• Qualitative and comparative case study methods. Structured, focused case comparison, process tracing (tracing the causal mechanism within a single case in detail), and archival and historical research remain central, especially in comparative politics, international relations, and political theory, where large-N statistical approaches are often infeasible or would obscure the mechanism of interest.
• Formal and game-theoretic modeling. Mathematical models of strategic interaction — how rational actors behave given the incentives and information available to them — are used to generate testable predictions about voting, bargaining, coalition formation, and international conflict, and remain a distinct methodological tradition within political methodology.
• Text-as-data and computational methods. A growing set of tools apply computational text analysis (including natural-language-processing techniques) to legislative speeches, party manifestos, court opinions, and social-media data, extracting measures of ideology, sentiment, or issue attention at a scale manual coding cannot match.
• Elite interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. Especially in comparative politics and international relations, direct interviews with political actors and sustained fieldwork within a political institution or setting remain important sources of evidence that survey and administrative data cannot fully substitute for.

Career and training pathways

A research career in political science typically follows the standard social-science doctoral model: a PhD program combining several years of graduate coursework across the discipline’s core subfields and methods, comprehensive/qualifying examinations, and an original dissertation, usually taking five to seven years to complete in the US system. Many programs require or strongly encourage training in quantitative methods, formal theory, or a qualitative methods sequence regardless of a student’s substantive subfield, reflecting the discipline’s methodologically pluralistic self-image described above.

Career paths for political science PhDs extend well beyond a traditional academic faculty position, including:

• Academic research and teaching at universities and colleges, the traditional path and still the most common destination for graduates of research-intensive doctoral programs.
• Government and public service, including legislative and executive-branch policy staff, the foreign service, intelligence analysis, and international organizations, where the discipline’s institutional and comparative expertise transfers directly.
• Think tanks and policy research organizations, producing applied policy analysis for a non-academic audience.
• Survey research, polling, and political consulting, applying the discipline’s quantitative and public-opinion methods commercially.
• Nonprofit and international-development organizations, particularly for graduates with comparative-politics or international-relations training.

The American Political Science Association (APSA), founded in 1903, is the discipline’s principal professional society in the US, with membership spanning more than 100 countries; it publishes the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, and the Journal of Political Science Education, and organizes dozens of specialized sections covering the discipline’s subfields. The Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) is a major regional society publishing the American Journal of Political Science, and the International Political Science Association (IPSA), founded in 1949, serves the discipline globally. These societies’ annual conferences function as the discipline’s primary venues for presenting new research and, for graduate students and early-career scholars, a central part of the academic job market.

Frequently asked questions

What is the simplest definition of political science?

Political science is the systematic study of government, power, and political behavior — who governs, how political decisions get made, and why, studied with the same empirical rigor applied to other social sciences.

Is political science the same as politics or political commentary?

No. Political science is an academic discipline that studies political institutions and behavior empirically, using data, formal models, and systematic comparison. Political commentary and punditry offer opinion and analysis of current events without necessarily following the discipline’s methodological standards.

What is the difference between political science and international relations?

International relations is a subfield within political science, focused specifically on interactions between states and other international actors — war, diplomacy, trade, and global governance. Political science as a whole also includes comparative politics, domestic/American politics, political theory, and public policy and administration.

What jobs can you get with a political science degree?

At the undergraduate level, common paths include law school, government and public administration, journalism, nonprofit work, and the private sector. At the doctoral level, common paths include academic research and teaching, government policy roles, the foreign service and intelligence analysis, think tanks, and survey research and political consulting.

Is political science a science?

Political science aims to study politics empirically and systematically, the way other social sciences do, but it faces a genuine methodological constraint the natural sciences generally don’t: politics is largely an observational rather than an experimental field, since researchers usually cannot randomly assign real-world political conditions. Much of the discipline’s methodology exists specifically to draw credible causal conclusions despite that constraint.

Related CASRAI guides

This guide is part of a series covering major academic and scientific disciplines for researchers and research administrators. See the overview of the branches of science for how political science fits alongside other fields, and the companion guides to sociology, economics, psychology, and anthropology for the social-science disciplines political science borders most closely. For the federal funding landscape and public-health-adjacent research this guide references, see the guides to epidemiology and ecology, both of which cover comparable funder and methods territory for their own fields.