Week 1 — Lecture Outline · What Is Political Science? Subfields, Concepts & Methods

Introduction to Political Science · POLS 1 Fall 2026 · Prof. Halloran Fictional sample

Course: Introduction to Political Science (POLS 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Halloran
Objectives covered: Objective 1 — describe the subfields and methods of political science and analyze political artifacts using the discipline's core tools (concept application, argument analysis, evidence evaluation, the comparative method, and the empirical/normative distinction).
SLOs touched: A (source and evaluate political texts and data) · B (build an evidence-based political argument)
Meeting pattern: 2 sessions × 75 min = 150 min. Segment minutes below total ~150; scale to your own pattern.

Week at a Glance


The week's big question	"What does it mean to study politics scientifically — and what can that kind of study tell us (and not tell us) about how we ought to be governed?"
By the end of the week, students can…	(1) define politics and political science in plain language; (2) name the five subfields and match a question to its subfield; (3) distinguish empirical from normative claims and explain why the discipline needs both; (4) run a basic political analysis on a real text — claim, premises, empirical-or-normative — using the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph.
Key vocabulary	politics, political science, power, government, the five subfields (political theory/philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, political methodology), empirical claim, normative claim, concept application, argument analysis (claim / premises / assumptions), evidence evaluation, the comparative method, legitimacy (previewed), consent of the governed
Materials	slides (Deck 1), the week's readings + the linked primary text (the Declaration of Independence transcript at the National Archives), one approved chatbot (Gemini / Claude / ChatGPT) for the AI-critique moment and the tutorial
Timing note	8 segments, ~150 min total. Session 1 = Segments 1–4 (~75). Session 2 = Segments 5–8 (~75).

Segment 1 — Hook & the Promise (8 min) · Session 1 opens

Hook. Put one question on a slide: "Name one thing in your day so far that politics did NOT touch." Take offers and gently knock each down: your phone (spectrum licenses, trade policy, chargers standardized by law), your coffee (tariffs, food-safety rules, minimum wage), your commute (roads, transit funding, the speed limit), this classroom (accreditation, tuition set by a board, the calendar set by a legislature). Land it: politics is not a place far away — it is the process by which every group bigger than one decides who gets what. Political science is the discipline that studies that process systematically.

The promise (write it on the board): "By Friday you'll carry a map of the whole discipline — five subfields, one toolkit — and you'll be able to take any political claim you meet and ask the two questions that organize this entire course: what kind of claim is that (is or ought)? and what's the evidence?"*

Why it matters line (memory hook): "Politics is who gets what, when, how. Political science is how we study it without just shouting."

Segment 2 — What Is Politics? What Makes Studying It a Science? (20 min)

Plain language first. Three classic one-liners, each real and attributed (put all three on one slide):
- Aristotle, Politics (4th century BCE): "man is by nature a political animal" — human beings naturally live in communities that must decide things together; politics isn't optional. (Accurately quoted from the Jowett translation; note for students: this claims we are community-forming by nature, not that everyone enjoys campaign ads.)
- Harold Lasswell (1936) gave the discipline its bluntest shorthand — politics is about "who gets what, when, how" (the title of his book).
- David Easton (1953) defined the political system as the "authoritative allocation of values" for a society — the process that decides, bindingly, whose priorities win.

The common thread: scarcity + disagreement + the need for collective, binding decisions. Where those three meet, there's politics — in nations, cities, campuses, workplaces, and families.

What makes the study "scientific"? Not lab coats — discipline about evidence:
- We define concepts precisely (so "democracy" means the same thing across an argument).
- We state claims so they can be checked — against documents, data, and cases.
- We compare (the closest thing the field has to an experiment).
- And we are honest about the line between what evidence can settle and what it can't.

Name the debate honestly (and evenhandedly) — it's this week's discussion: whether political science is "really" a science is itself contested. Proponents argue the field builds testable theories, measures carefully, and predicts better than folk wisdom (polling, institutional analysis, the democratic-peace research program). Critics respond that people aren't particles — they learn, strategize, and change when studied; experiments are often impossible or unethical; and values saturate the questions we ask. Most working political scientists live somewhere in the middle: systematic, evidence-disciplined inquiry — with humility about prediction. You'll take your own position Friday; both sides get their strongest case.

Segment 3 — The Five Subfields: A Tour of the Discipline (and of This Course) (22 min)

Set it up: "Political science is organized into five subfields. Here's the whole map — and notice: it's also the map of our 16 weeks."

The tour (one slide per stop; a question anchors each):
- Political theory / philosophy — the oldest subfield, the ought questions: What is justice? What makes power legitimate? What do we owe each other? (Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Rawls.) Our Weeks 2–4.
- Comparative politics — compare political systems within countries: Why is one country a democracy and its neighbor a dictatorship? Why do some states deliver services and others can't? Our Weeks 5–7, 9, 13.
- International relations — politics between states, where there's no world government: war and peace, alliances, trade, international law and organizations. Our Week 14–15.
- American government — the deep study of one case (ours): the Constitution, federalism, Congress, the presidency, the courts, elections. Our Weeks 10–12 (and the U.S. shows up as an example all term).
- Political methodology — the toolmaker's subfield: how to measure opinion, design a comparison, read a dataset without fooling yourself. Embedded in every week — especially the data workshops (W11–13, 15).

The clarification students always need: the subfields are lenses, not walls. One event — say, a country adopting a new constitution — can be read by all five: a theorist asks if it's just, a comparativist asks how it stacks up against other constitutions, an IR scholar asks what treaties bind it, an Americanist compares it to the U.S. case, and a methodologist asks how we'd measure whether it "works."

Quick interaction (~4 min): call out a question, class names the subfield: "Does proportional representation produce more parties?" (comparative) · "Is civil disobedience ever justified?" (theory) · "Why do states form alliances?" (IR) · "How should we word a poll question about tuition?" (methodology) · "Can the president pardon anyone?" (American).

Segment 4 — Misconceptions + Quick Interaction (25 min) · Session 1 closes (~75)

Name the misconceptions out loud, then cure each:

❌ "Political science is just having opinions about politics — punditry with homework."
✅ Cure: pundits start from a side; political scientists start from a question and follow rules of evidence that anyone — from any party — can check. The discipline's product is warranted claims, not takes.
❌ "Politics means national politics — presidents and capitals."
✅ Cure: politics is collective decision-making wherever it happens — a city council, a school board, a union local, a condo association, this campus. The same concepts (power, authority, legitimacy) apply at every scale.
❌ "Empirical claims are true and normative claims are 'just opinions.'"
✅ Cure: wrong twice. An empirical claim can be false ("the U.S. Senate has 120 members" — it has 100), and a normative claim can be rigorously argued — from premises, with reasons, answering objections. Weeks 3–4 are exactly that craft. The distinction is about the kind of support a claim needs, not its worth.
❌ "This course will tell me which ideology or party is right."
✅ Cure: it will not — on purpose. The course gives you the strongest case for each major position and grades your evidence and reasoning, never your conclusions. (Fairness isn't a decoration here; it's the discipline's standard for handling contested questions.)

Interaction — Is or Ought? (rapid-fire, ~10 min):
Put claims on a slide; students call empirical (is) or normative (ought), solo (15 sec), compare with a neighbor, then vote: "The U.S. Senate has 100 members" (E — and checkable) · "The voting age should be lowered to 16" (N) · "Countries using proportional representation tend to have more parties in parliament" (E — comparative, testable) · "Democracy is the best form of government" (N — and Week 5's discussion) · "Voter turnout in U.S. midterms is lower than in presidential years" (E) · "The Senate gives every state two senators" (E — institutional design, documented) · "The Senate ought to be proportional to population" (N). For the last pair, land the week's central move: the same institution generates both kinds of claims — never let a speaker smuggle an ought inside an is.

Segment 5 — A Worked "Think-Like-a-Political-Scientist" Moment: the Declaration, ¶2 (24 min) · Session 2 opens

Hook back in: "Last session: the map. Today: the toolkit — on a document you've heard quoted your whole life."

The document: the Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4, 1776; principal drafter Thomas Jefferson. Put the famous second-paragraph excerpt on a slide, accurately quoted from the National Archives transcript:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"

Walk the analysis out loud (this is the workshop's method, modeled):
- Concept application: the passage is about legitimacy — what makes power rightful. Its answer: consent. (Flag: Week 2 gives this concept its full treatment — Weber's types, the social contract.)
- Argument analysis: find the structure. Premises: all are created equal; all hold unalienable rights; government's purpose is to secure those rights. Conclusion (stated just after our excerpt): when a government destroys those ends, the people may alter or abolish it. It's a deductive argument, not just poetry.
- Empirical or normative? Sort it: "all men are created equal" — normative (a moral axiom, offered as "self-evident," not a measurement); "governments are instituted among men" — arguably empirical (a claim about what governments are for / how they arise — historians and theorists debate it); "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" — normative (a standard for just power). The document mixes kinds on purpose — that's why it persuades.
- Evidence evaluation: what would count as evidence for or against the empirical parts? (Do governments in fact arise from consent? Mostly not, historically — conquest and inheritance are common — which is why later thinkers refined "consent" into something more subtle. The normative claim survives that finding — but must be defended by argument, not measurement.)

Land the key idea: a political scientist doesn't ask first "do I agree?" — she asks "what exactly is being claimed, what kind of claim is it, and what would support it?" Agreement comes after analysis, if at all.

Segment 6 — The Toolkit, Named and Numbered (18 min)

Put the four tools on one slide; one line each — this is the spine of every week's workshop:
- Concept application — take a defined concept (power, authority, legitimacy, sovereignty…) and apply it to a real case, precisely.
- Argument analysis — find the claim, the premises, the hidden assumptions; then ask: is each premise empirical or normative, and does the conclusion follow?
- Evidence evaluation — what does this document / poll / dataset actually show — and what does it not show? (Correlation or causation? Compared to what? Says who?)
- The comparative method — the field's substitute for the lab: compare cases on defined dimensions and see what varies together. (Full treatment Week 13.)

Memory hook (put it on a slide):

"Define it, take it apart, test it, compare it."

For texts specifically (this week's workshop and most weeks after): we use standard source work — sourcing (who wrote this, to whom, when, why?), contextualization (what world produced it?), close reading (what exactly does it say?), corroboration (what do other sources show?) — plus the argument analysis above. For data (Weeks 11–13, 15): a read-the-data scaffold — what's measured, over what population and period, what it shows, what it doesn't, correlation vs. causation, margin of error.

The clarification students always need: the tools are side-neutral. They dismantle bad arguments you agree with just as efficiently as bad arguments you don't — and that is precisely their value.

Segment 7 — Empirical vs. Normative: the Distinction That Runs the Course (15 min)

Go one level deeper than the sorting drill:
- Empirical claims are about what is — they're settled (when they can be settled) by evidence: documents, counts, comparisons. They can be false; they can also be uncertain (good empirical work states its uncertainty — wait for Week 12's margin of error).
- Normative claims are about what ought to be — they're supported by reasons and principles: appeals to justice, liberty, equality, welfare, tradition. They can't be settled by measurement, but they can be argued well or badly — with clear premises, consistency, and honest treatment of objections (Weeks 3–4's craft).
- The two cooperate constantly. Nearly every real political argument is a sandwich: a normative principle + empirical claims about the world + a normative conclusion. Good analysis pulls the layers apart and checks each with the right tool.
- The two failure modes to watch for all term: (1) smuggling — dressing an ought as an is ("studies show we must…" — studies show is-facts; the must came from somewhere else); (2) shrugging — treating every normative dispute as mere taste, as if reasons didn't matter. The discipline rejects both.

Quick interaction (~4 min): give the sandwich a squeeze — "Turnout is lower among younger voters (E); a democracy is healthier when participation is broad (N); therefore we should adopt election-day registration (N-conclusion resting on a further E-claim: that it raises turnout)." Have students label each layer, then ask: which layers could a study settle? (The E ones — and Week 12 shows how.)

Segment 8 — Technology Workflow + AI-Critique, Callback & Hand-off (18 min) · Session 2 closes (~75)

Technology workflow — the analysis habit, on demand:
1. Open any political text. Before reacting, write three headers: Claim / Kind (is-or-ought) / Evidence.
2. Fill them in from the text's exact words — not your memory of it.
3. Note one thing the text doesn't say (the silence is data too).
4. Only then: your evaluation.

AI-critique moment (students verify, not consume):

Paste this to an approved chatbot: "Give me the exact wording of the Declaration of Independence's famous line about the rights people have, and tell me where the idea came from."
Then check its work against the real transcript linked in this module. The classic slips to catch: the chatbot rendering the line as "life, liberty, and property" — that's John Locke's trio (life, liberty, estate/property), which Jefferson deliberately changed to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"; inventing a "quotation" that appears nowhere in the document; or asserting a single tidy "source" for a document with braided influences. Your job all term: the tool drafts, you verify against the source. This is exactly how the weekly Lecture Tutorial and the Political Analysis Workshop work — you catch the model, not trust it.

Callback + tease:
- Callback: "Everything this term rides on this week — the map (five subfields), the toolkit (define, take apart, test, compare), and the is/ought distinction."
- Tease next week: "Next week we take the course's first big concepts seriously: power, authority, legitimacy, and the state — and we meet three thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) who looked at the same terrifying question — why obey anyone at all? — and gave three different answers that still organize politics today."

Hand-off (the week's graded work):
- Lecture Tutorial 1 (AI tutor, share-link submission) — the subfields, the toolkit, and empirical vs. normative.
- Quiz 1, Discussion 1 ("Is Political Science a Science?"), and Assignment 1 ("Consent of the Governed?" — a short thesis-driven argument from the Declaration's own words).
- Political Analysis Workshop 1 — the Declaration of Independence, ¶2 — source it, take its argument apart, sort its claims, then catch the AI's mistakes about it.

Instructor FAQ — Common Stumbles

Student says / does	Quick cure
"Political science is just opinions."	Pundits start from a side; we start from a question and rules of evidence anyone can check.
Confuses the subfields.	Theory = ought; comparative = within countries, compared; IR = between states; American = our case in depth; methodology = the tools.
"Empirical = true."	Empirical = checkable — and sometimes checked and found false. Kind ≠ verdict.
"Normative = just opinion."	Normative claims are argued from premises and principles — well or badly. Weeks 3–4 teach the craft.
Sorts by topic, not by kind ("it mentions the Senate, so it's empirical").	The same institution generates both kinds — "the Senate has 100 members" (E) vs. "the Senate ought to be proportional" (N). Ask what would support this claim?
"The Declaration says life, liberty, and property."	That's Locke's trio. Jefferson wrote "the pursuit of Happiness" — check the transcript, not your memory (or the chatbot's).
Expects the course to declare a winner among ideologies.	The course presents each position's strongest case and grades reasoning, never conclusions.
Trusts an AI-supplied "quotation."	Verify every quote against the actual document — chatbots fabricate convincing fakes.

Scope flag

This outline stays within Objective 1 (the discipline, its subfields, and its methods). Power, authority, legitimacy, and the state get their full treatment in Week 2 (legitimacy is only previewed here via the Declaration); the ideologies are Week 3; no institution is analyzed in depth (that's Weeks 6–10). The Declaration of Independence is referenced factually with one accurately-quoted excerpt (National Archives transcript); the Aristotle, Lasswell, and Easton attributions are real and verified. The is-it-a-science debate and the consent-of-the-governed question are presented evenhandedly — both positions at full strength, no verdict issued. The instructor and institution remain fictional.

~ Prof. Halloran's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com