Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

PART 1. A. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS POLITICAL SCIENCE? (What does political…

- - - - Like all social sciences, the political science have 3 major characteristics:
        
        Axiological neutrality: separation of analysis and value judgment. (Max Weber) > Political scientists do not seek to establish what is right, legal, desirable... they don't seek to either justify or condemn.
        
        Ambition of systemization: the goal of each science is to identify trends and patterns, regularities, to rely on theories and concept > it is used to create models for comparison.
        
        Use of scientific methods: it uses vigorous and specific qualitative and quantitative methods.
- - - - The collapse of democracy: Weimar's Republic, rise of nationalism, WWII etc. > challenged the faith of political scientists in the power of political institutions.
      - The influence of new methods designed to study political behavior, such as opinion pools. By doing so, he showed the importance of representative pools. Indeed, representation is more important than the number of people surveyed, especially as for voting pools: it became the force of political science in analyzing people's voting behavior.
    - - The rational school: influence of income on political behavior.
      - The sociological school: influence of the social environment on political behavior.