[MUSIC] Hi, in this module, I'm going to introduce the discipline of political science. Political science broadly speaking is the study of government and politics. It seeks to understand the institutions, especially the political institutions that play a role in the distribution of power and resources. In every society, when we think about power and political resources, they are distributed not just by the economy and interactions in the economy. But they are distributed through the operation of institutions like governments, bureaucracies, legislatures, and so forth that are made up of people. And the assumption is that these institutions, it could be government bureaucracies, it could be legislatures. It could be bodies of elites in different societies. The assumption is that these entities essentially follow rules, internal rules that shape their behaviour or shape their decision-making. Rules that can be discovered through a process of research. Now again, politics and government was a traditional focus of inquiry for philosophers going back centuries, in fact, millenia. This was true in both the East and the West. The most famous ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and Chinese philosophers had a lot to say about what we would now think of as government and politics. A lot of their work was devoted to offering advice to kings or emperors about the ideal way to govern. But what we think of now as political science, and what has emerged in the last few centuries as a distinct discipline within social science. We think of as being distinct and different from that tradition of philosophy because of its reliance on evidence. And this, again, is a more recent origin, especially in the last two centuries growing out of the enlightenment. One of the earliest political scientists, or rather, one of the earliest thinkers we now recognize as a political scientist as supposed to a philosopher was Montesquieu. He was one of the people responsible for inventing the idea of the separation of powers. Of course, this was extremely influential in the 18th century when the Constitution of the United States was designed. And was designed to in fact incorporate explicitly a separation of powers. He also conducted other studies. For example, he tried to link social and political organization to climatic factors in different countries. Another important figure at this time, a [INAUDIBLE] representative of a very different tradition within political science was Condorcet. He was actually a gifted mathematician in his own right. And he carried out some of the first mathematical studies of voting theory. That is, using the tools of mathematics to try to understand how in a group of voters who might be again voting to arrive at some kind of decision. And if they were all individually following different kinds of rules when they were casting their votes to express their preferences, what kinds of outcomes this could lead to. And he showed, in fact, that there were limitations to many ways of casting votes. Such that the decisions that might come out of a vote might not actually reflect the true preferences of all the people voting. This was important work, and a lot of political science today, as we'll talk about in a bit, in some ways represents a follow up on this sort of line of inquiry. Another important 19th century political scientist was De Tocqueville. He conducted important empirical studies of France in the time leading up to the French Revolution in the 18th century. He also, in the 19th century, conducted an important study of the United States called Democracy in America, based on his travels in the United States. In which he tried to understand politics in the United States and its relationship to civic organization and indeed social organization there. Over the course of the 20th century, political science in the United States has evolved. Again, and in some ways somewhat like sociology, political science started out as an effort to understand governments or countries or political systems in their entirety. Develop theories about why countries, entire countries might differ. As time went on, especially over the course of the 20th century, it has diversified. And now a lot research within political science examines in detail the behaviour of the entities, the institutions, that make up a polity. So there's a lot of work in political science now that goes beyond trying to understand entire countries. And looks at for example at the behavior of legislatures. How do we understand the behavior of the legislators who are casting votes for different kinds of laws? Other areas within political science focus on voters. They try to understand how voters make decisions when presented with different choices in an election. Another area that has become very important in political science, and, in fact, represents a strain within political science that dates back to Condorcet, has been the rise of formal theory. So there is a large segment, actually highly deductive, within political science. In which people try to use mathematical tools to understand voting processes and decision-making processes. Game theory is especially important in this area within political science. So using mathematical tools to understand why in different settings, perhaps the legislators who make up a legislature might cooperate or not cooperate when they are trying to seek particular goals. Another big direction for political science over the 20th century has been the rise of quantitative research. So early political science was heavily qualitative. Especially as political scientists sought to understand the behavior of entire countries, or entire governments. Political scientists had a strong historical cast to it, where people looked to history to understand the present. Nowadays, many political scientists gather quantitative data, might be data on voting behaviour. It might be data on the composition of legislatures, or bodies of political elites to try to understand the operation of those entities. Now, I'd like to introduce the most important sub-disciplines within political science. Again, political science like sociology is divided into many sub-disciplines. And I can only give you a taste of some of them here, but I'll talk about some of the most important ones. One sub-discipline within political science that has perhaps one of the longest traditions is comparative politics. That is, trying to understand differences in the political organization, the political institutions that characterize different countries or different regions. Obviously if we think about the contemporary world, there are big differences, both between east and west and indeed within regions in the ways that countries organize themselves politically. Some are democracies, but again, there are different types of democracy. Some are autocracies or other forms of government which are not democratic. So comparative politics is trying to understand how these differences in governments emerge. And what their implications are. Why has, for example, democracy of a particular form emerged in Northwest Europe? And persisted in many parts of the English speaking and in some other parts of the world later in the 20th century? And why have other forms of government persisted elsewhere? Another big area within political science is international relations. Studying the ways in which countries interact with each other. So countries, or the leader of countries, constantly making decisions about how to interact with other countries. They may decide to sign peace treaties, or sign treaties for economic cooperation. Or they may join international bodies, like the United Nations or the World Health Organization. So international relations is the effort to study why countries make decisions about interacting with other countries. Why they go to war, why do they sign treaties? Why do they form alliances with one country but become enemies of another country? So in international relations, there's a lot of activity now trying to study what we refer to as multilateral bodies. because nowadays, a lot of international relations involves multiple countries signing treaties to cooperate. In the past, some of the most famous work in international relations were the studies in the 1950s and 60s and the 70s of the Cold War. The interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union and their proxies, and then the role of China in these interactions. Another important area in political science with somewhat of a more applied focus is public administration. So this is the study broadly speaking of the ways in which politics can be applied in societies. It can include the management of bureaucracies. When we think about running a bureaucracy that employs thousands of people, how do we make decisions about choosing people to work in that bureaucracy and how to promote them and how to organize the bureaucracy. Public administration can also include questions of government regulation,. How do governments make choices about rules and regulations to impose on people. Or how do they set taxes, and so forth. All of these are fundamentally political decisions. And public administration is the study of this domain. Another very important area in political science is political behavior. Essentially the study, especially of individuals, as they make political choices. A classic topic in this area is voting behavior. How do you individuals, when they're in the ballot box, make choices between different candidates? On the one hand people are assumed to make choices between different candidates, or in some cases, make choices between different laws if they're voting on a referendum, they're assumed to maximize their own interests. But of course, they're subject to all sorts of influences. So the study of voting behavior in the broader context of political behavior is trying to understand how people make these choices. And then more broadly, how their political preferences are shaped. The study of political behavior can also focus on others that are constituents of a political system. For example, elite decision making or the decision making of elite bureaucrats or legislatures in certain governments. Finally, there is the study of political institutions. So if we think about any particular government or any particular political system, it's made up of different institutions that interact with each other. One of the clearest examples that I mentioned earlier, in the United States, there's a separation of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. The courts, the congress, and the president each have distinct roles. Each represent an institution. And the study of political institutions is the study of these specific institutions within in a larger government. Perhaps the courts or the legislature or an executive branch. So, these are some of the most prominent sub-disciplines within political science. If you pursue graduate training in political science, you'll be exposed to many other sub-disciplines through your course work. And you'll find out that, in fact, there are overlaps between all of these sub-disciplines. And there are many opportunities for further research in each of them as well as the other sub-disciplines that I haven't talked about here.
