According to the Oxford English Dictionary, political science refers to that branch of knowledge concerned with political activity and behavior.Considering the wide varieties of political activities and behaviors and the constant changes that they undergo, this definition is still a general statement that informs the reader of little of the nature and scope of the discipline. Political science is methodologically diverse; to the discipline include classical political philosophy, positivism, interpretive, structuralism, and behavioralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies and model building. Political science is a late arrival in terms of social sciences.

However, the discipline has a clear set of antecedents such as moral philosophy, political philosophy, political economy, political theology, history, and other fields concerned with normative determinations of what ought to be and with deducing the characteristics and functions of the ideal state. In each historic period and in almost every geographic area, we can find someone studying politics and increasing political understanding. Political science focuses upon politics and political systems and the behavior of people within political systems. Since political science is essentially a study of human behavior, in all aspects of politics, observations in controlled environments are usually not available and impossible to reproduce or duplicate.

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