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Week 1 · Chapter

Chapter 1 — What Is Political Science? Subfields, Concepts & Methods

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 1 (describe the subfields and methods of political science — political theory and philosophy, comparative politics, international relations, American government, and political methodology — and analyze a political text or dataset with the discipline's core tools: concept application, argument analysis, evidence evaluation, the comparative method, and the empirical/normative distinction) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, and the quiz all build on it.

In plain language

This week is about what politics is and how you can study it with care instead of with hunches. Politics (the way a group makes decisions that bind everyone in it when there is not enough to go around and people disagree) happens in a nation, a city, a campus, and a workplace. Political science (the careful, checkable study of those decisions) splits into five areas, each asking its own kind of question. You will learn to tell an empirical claim (a statement about what is, which evidence can check) from a normative claim (a statement about what ought to be, which you defend with reasons). Then you will use those tools on a real founding text, the Declaration of Independence (1776), and decide for yourself whether this field deserves the name science.

Why you already care about this

Picture a group chat of 8 friends trying to pick a restaurant for a birthday dinner. 2 want tacos, 3 want ramen, and 1 cannot afford anything over a modest price. Someone proposes a vote, someone else says the birthday person should choose, and a third person quietly books a table. By the end of the night, one decision binds all 8 people, and not everyone is happy about it.

You have lived through bigger versions of that chat. A campus senate set a fee you pay every term. A manager changed the holiday schedule at your job. A town council closed a street you use. In each case, a group made a choice for everyone, under limits, with people who disagreed. That is politics, and you are already inside it.

This chapter gives you the tools a political scientist brings to those moments. They are the same tools you will use on every topic in this course, from constitutions to elections to world affairs.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

say what makes a decision political and what makes its study a science;
match Lasswell and Easton to their shorthand definitions with year and title;
name the subfield a question belongs to and point several subfields at one event;
take an argument apart into its claim, premises, and unstated premise;
sort a claim as empirical or normative by its kind, not its topic;
run the four moves on the Declaration's second paragraph.

Carry this line with you: sort a claim by its kind, not by its topic.

Where we are

This week: what politics and political science are, the field's shorthand definitions, the five subfields, the toolkit, the empirical/normative distinction, the four moves on a founding text, and the question of whether the field is a science.
How they connect: this chapter is the foundation, so there is no earlier week to lean on; every later week uses the toolkit and the empirical/normative distinction you build here.
Where we're going next: Week 2, Power, Authority, Legitimacy & the State, asks why anyone obeys a government at all, and it picks up the consent standard you meet at the end of this chapter.

This is the first week of the course, so nothing earlier is assumed. You need no background in politics and no math beyond adding small whole numbers. What you do need is a willingness to slow down and ask what kind of claim you are hearing. Give the Declaration section your full attention, because next week builds directly on it.

1. Define politics: study the question, not the opinion

Think about a neighborhood association (an illustrative scenario) with one small yearly budget. Half the members want new streetlights on a dark corner. The other half want a community garden on an empty lot. The money covers one project, not both, and whatever the members choose, every household's dues pay for it.

That small fight has everything a political scientist looks for. There is scarcity (not enough money for both projects). There is disagreement (members want different things). And the decision is binding (it applies to every household, including those who voted the other way).

Politics is collective, binding decision-making wherever scarcity and disagreement meet, whether in a nation, a city, a campus, or a workplace.

Political science is the systematic study of politics, which starts from a question and checks its answers against rules of evidence that anyone can apply.

Notice the word systematic. A political scientist does not begin with "my side is right." A political scientist begins with a question, such as why did the garden win?, and then asks what evidence would answer it: the vote count, the meeting minutes, who showed up, and who stayed home.

Worked example — is it politics? Decide whether each situation is political in this course's sense.

A group chat of eight friends chooses one restaurant for a birthday dinner. It is collective (eight people), it binds them (one table, one place), and they disagree under a limit (price). Yes, it is politics, on a small scale.
One student decides alone what to eat for lunch. There is no group, so there is no collective decision. It is a choice, but it is not politics.
A workplace decides which staff members must work on a holiday. There is scarcity (someone has to cover the shift), disagreement (nobody wants it), and a binding rule. Yes, it is politics.

In words: a decision is political when a group makes it for everyone under limits and disagreement; a decision one person makes alone is not.

Misconception check. Students often think political science is having opinions about politics, the kind of arguing you hear on a call-in show. That is tempting, because the subject matter is heated and everyone has a view. But the discipline starts from a question and from rules of evidence that anyone can check. Two political scientists who disagree about what ought to happen can still agree about what the vote count shows.

Memory hook: a question first, evidence second; your verdict last.

2. Read the shorthand definitions: who gets what

Long before you took this course, scholars tried to fit politics into one phrase. Two of those phrases are the discipline's shorthand, and you will hear both in later weeks.

The first comes from Harold Lasswell (1936), Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. The book's title is itself the definition: politics is about who gets what, when they get it, and how. It points you at the winners, the losers, and the process in between.

The second comes from David Easton (1953), The Political System. Easton described politics as the "authoritative allocation of values". In plain words, the authoritative allocation of values is what a political system does: it makes decisions about who gets what that are accepted as binding on a whole society. The word values here means the things a community prizes and argues over, such as money, land, safety, or status.

Much older still, Aristotle's Politics describes the human being as a political animal. You do not need to memorize that work this week. It is named here so you can see that the questions in this course are very old ones.

Worked example — Lasswell's phrase on the neighborhood budget. Apply who gets what, when, how to the streetlight-or-garden fight from Section 1.

Who gets what? If the garden wins, the members who wanted green space get it; the members on the dark corner do not get their lights.
When? This year's budget, so the losing side waits at least another year.
How? By a majority vote of the members who came to the meeting, which means members who stayed home had no say.

In words: Lasswell's question turns a fight about a garden into a map of winners, losers, timing, and process.

Misconception check. Students, and chatbots, often swap the two definitions and credit "who gets what" to Easton. That is tempting, because both phrases describe the same idea. The cure is the year and the title: Lasswell (1936) wrote the book whose title is Politics: Who Gets What, When, How; Easton (1953) wrote The Political System and the phrase "authoritative allocation of values".

Memory hook: Lasswell asks who gets what; Easton says authority allocates it.

3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event

Imagine one news story about a made-up coastal country, Esterra. Its parliament is deciding whether to sign a treaty with a neighbor that limits fishing in a shared sea. Fishing families worry about their jobs. Scientists worry about the fish. The neighbor wants a deal.

A political scientist could study that one story from five directions. Those directions are the field's subfields: the main areas this course uses to divide the discipline, each asking its own kind of question.

Political theory and philosophy asks what ought to be. Is it fair to limit today's fishing families to protect the fish for future families?
Comparative politics compares systems within countries. How does Esterra's parliament ratify a treaty, and how does that compare with the process in its neighbor?
International relations studies politics between states. Why would two states with no government above them agree to limit themselves at all?
American government studies one case in depth, the United States. How would the same kind of decision move through the institutions of that one well-documented country?
Political methodology supplies the tools. How would you measure what Esterra's public thinks about the treaty, and how would you know your measure is any good?

This course counts five subfields. That count is a convention, the common way introductory courses divide the field; some departments also list public law, public administration, or public policy as fields of their own.

Worked example — name the lens. Match each question to the subfield that asks it.

"Do countries with two-chamber legislatures pass treaties more slowly than countries with one?" It compares systems across countries, so it is comparative politics.
"Should a parliament ever bind future generations?" It asks what ought to be, so it is political theory and philosophy.
"Would a poll of 600 Esterrans give a trustworthy picture of public opinion?" It is about the tool for gathering evidence, so it is political methodology.

In words: you name the subfield from the kind of question being asked, and one event can carry questions from all five.

Misconception check. Students often treat the subfields as walls, as if a treaty story belongs only to international relations. That is tempting, because course catalogs list the subfields separately. But the subfields are lenses, not walls: the same treaty raises a fairness question, a comparison question, a between-states question, an in-depth-case question, and a measurement question.

Memory hook: one event, five lenses.

4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question

A carpenter carries a tape measure, a level, a saw, and a square. A political scientist carries four tools, and you will use all four every week.

Concept application means taking a defined idea, stated precisely, and using it to sort or explain a specific case.
Argument analysis means taking an argument apart into its claim, the premises offered for it, and the assumptions it needs, so each piece can be checked on its own.
Evidence evaluation means asking what a document, case, or dataset actually shows, what it does not show, and whether a pattern in it is a correlation or a cause.
The comparative method means placing a case beside one or more other cases on defined dimensions so the similarities and differences can narrow down an explanation.

Argument analysis needs four words of its own. A claim is a sentence that asserts something can be so or ought to be so. A premise is a claim offered as a reason for accepting another claim. The conclusion is the claim the premises are offered to support. An unstated premise is an assumption an argument needs in order to work but never says out loud.

Worked example — the campus senate's library fee (illustrative). A campus senate member argues: "The library should stay open until 2 a.m. Students who work day jobs need a quiet place to study at night, and the library cannot afford the staff on its current budget. So the senate should add a late-night library fee to every student's bill."

Concept application. Is this politics? A group (the senate) would make a choice that binds every student (the fee), under scarcity (the budget) and disagreement (not every student studies at night). Yes.
Argument analysis. The conclusion is "the senate should add a late-night library fee to every student's bill." The premises are that working students need a quiet place at night and that the library cannot afford the staff now. The unstated premise is that every student, not only the students who use the late hours, should share the cost.
Evidence evaluation. A count of how many students use the library after 10 p.m. would show demand. It would not show whether the fee is fair, and it would not show why some students never come.
Comparative method. Compare the proposal with the campus gym, which might charge only the students who use it. Placing the two side by side brings the unstated premise into view: should a shared service be paid for by everyone or by its users?

In words: the four tools turned one senate speech into a definition check, an argument map, an evidence question, and a comparison that exposed a hidden assumption.

Misconception check. Students often think that finding an unstated premise means they have found a flaw. That is tempting, because "hidden assumption" sounds like an accusation. But every argument rests on assumptions; finding one is not finding a flaw. The next step is to ask whether the assumption is reasonable and who might reject it.

Memory hook: apply, take apart, test, compare.

5. Sort claims: empirical versus normative

Two people at a town meeting (an illustrative scenario) are both talking about the same bike lane. One says, "Since the lane opened, fewer cyclists have been hurt on Main Street." The other says, "The city ought to put cyclists' safety ahead of drivers' convenience." Both sentences are about the bike lane. They are not the same kind of sentence.

The first is something you could check: pull the injury reports from before and after. The second is a statement about priorities, and no report can settle it alone. That difference runs the whole course.

An empirical claim is a claim about what is, or why something happens, that can be checked against evidence and can turn out to be false.

A normative claim is a claim about what ought to be, such as what is just or worth doing, that is defended by argument from values and premises and can be argued well or badly.

Two failure modes show up again and again, and both have names in this course.

Smuggling is slipping an ought into a sentence that is presented as a plain statement of fact. "The data show the city must widen the lane" smuggles a must inside a show.
Shrugging is treating a value question as mere opinion, as if reasons and premises made no difference. "Well, that's your opinion" shrugs off an argument instead of answering it.

Worked example — one topic, two kinds. The outline's own pair shows why you sort by kind, not by topic.

"The Senate has 100 members." This is empirical: a design fact, checkable against Article I, Section 3, which gives two Senators from each State.
"The Senate ought to be proportional to population." This is normative: it says how the Senate should be built, and it must be argued from values such as equal representation for each person.

In words: both claims are about the same institution, yet one can be checked against the text and the other must be argued.

Misconception check. Students often think empirical means true and normative means only an opinion. Both halves are wrong. Empirical means checkable: an empirical claim can be checked and found false ("the Senate has 120 members" is empirical and false). Normative claims are not mere opinions either; they are argued well or badly from premises you can examine.

Memory hook: is can be checked; ought must be argued.

6. Run the four moves on a founding text

Now put everything together on a real document. The Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776 by the Second Continental Congress, with Thomas Jefferson as its principal drafter. Its second paragraph is one of the most quoted arguments in political history. You are going to analyze it as an argument, not admire it or condemn it. Every quotation below is copied from the National Archives transcript.

Run the four moves in order: define and apply a concept; find the premises, the conclusion, and the unstated premise; ask what the evidence shows and does not; compare it to one other case.

Worked example — the four moves on the Declaration's second paragraph. Take the moves in order, one numbered step at a time.

Move 1, define and apply. Legitimacy is the widely shared belief that the people in power have a right to be there; you will build that idea in full next week. The paragraph's standard of legitimacy is that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed".
Move 2, the premises. "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." The trio is "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", not "life, liberty, and property", which is Locke's trio.
Move 2, the conclusion. When a government becomes destructive of those ends, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it".
Move 2, the unstated premise. The paragraph never says who judges when a government has become destructive. The argument needs that judge. You will not find one named.
Move 3, the evidence. The transcript shows what the Second Continental Congress adopted in 1776 and how the argument is built. It does not show, by itself, whether the premises are true, and the analysis is of the argument, not a verdict on it.
Move 4, compare. A campus club whose bylaws (illustrative) let members remove an officer by a majority vote at a called meeting states its judge and its procedure in writing; the Declaration states a right to alter or abolish and names no procedure. You see the same consent standard in a different design.

Then sort the paragraph's claims by kind. Four claims are sorted below.

The Declaration's second paragraph (1776): four claims sorted by kind
Claim, as the transcript prints it	Kind
"all men are created equal"	normative
"Governments are instituted among Men"	empirical-leaning (a claim about where governments come from)
"deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"	normative (a standard)
"it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"	normative (the conclusion)

Count the kinds: 3 normative and 1 empirical-leaning, so 3 + 1 = 4 claims sorted. In words: the paragraph is mostly an argument about what ought to be, resting on one claim about how governments arise.

A caveat about the word empirical-leaning: "Governments are instituted among Men" reads mainly as a statement about what is, but it sits inside a normative argument, so you label it carefully rather than treating it as a lab finding.

In practice (your tools). Open the National Archives page titled "Declaration of Independence: A Transcription" in your browser. Use the browser's find command (Ctrl+F on Windows, Command+F on a Mac) and type consent of the governed to jump to the standard. Then search alter or to abolish to find the conclusion. Copy each fragment exactly as the transcript prints it, including its capital letters, because a quotation that drifts from its source is a different quotation.

Misconception check. Students, and chatbots, often render the Declaration's trio as "life, liberty, and property." That is tempting, because the phrase sounds familiar. But that is Locke's trio; the pinned text reads "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Check every quotation against its source, letter for letter.

Honesty note: this section analyzes the argument's structure. Whether the premises are true, and whether the conclusion was justified in 1776, are real questions; they are questions for evidence and for argument, and the four moves are how you would start on them.

Memory hook: a quotation without its source is a rumor.

7. Weigh the question: is political science a science?

Here is a question political scientists still argue about among themselves. When a chemist says science, she can mix two chemicals a thousand times and watch what happens. When a political scientist studies a revolution, there was only one. So is political science a science at all?

This is a contested question, and this course hands you the strongest case on each side.

Proponents argue that political science is a science in the sense that matters. It states claims that can be checked and found false. It follows rules of evidence that any careful reader can apply, so two scholars with opposite politics can agree on what a document says or what a vote count shows. Where laboratory experiments are impossible, it uses comparison to narrow down explanations. On this view, science names a method of checking, not a laboratory.

Critics respond that the label promises more than the field can deliver. People change their behavior when they are studied, predicted, or reported on, which no molecule does. Many political events, like a founding or a war, happen once or a few times, so there are too few cases to test an explanation the way a lab tests a reaction. And the field's normative half, the questions about what ought to be, cannot be settled by evidence at all. On this view, the field is a careful, disciplined study of politics, and calling it a science invites false confidence.

A third position tries to hold both: the field is scientific in its empirical work and philosophical in its normative work, and part of a political scientist's skill is knowing which kind of question is on the table. That is one more position to weigh, not the answer.

Pause and think. Choose one option and write two or three sentences.

(a) Pick the strongest point on the side you find less convincing and state it as fairly as its best defender would.
(b) Name one political question you care about and say whether it is mainly empirical, mainly normative, or both, and what evidence or argument would move you on it.

Misconception check. Students often think this question has a settled answer they are supposed to find and memorize. That is tempting, because most textbook questions do. But this one is genuinely contested, and your discussion grade rewards how fairly you state each side and how well you reason, not which side you pick.

A limitation worth saying out loud: the empirical/normative line is a classroom model. Real sentences sometimes mix the two, and part of the skill is pulling them apart before you argue about either.

Memory hook: a science in its method, an argument in its values.

Key terms

politics — Collective, binding decision-making wherever scarcity and disagreement meet, whether in a nation, a city, a campus, or a workplace. (first used: 1. Define politics: study the question, not the opinion)
political science — The systematic study of politics, which starts from a question and checks its answers against rules of evidence that anyone can apply. (first used: 1. Define politics: study the question, not the opinion)
authoritative allocation of values — David Easton's shorthand, from The Political System (1953), for what a political system does: it makes decisions about who gets what that are accepted as binding on a whole society. (first used: 2. Read the shorthand definitions: who gets what)
subfield — One of the five main areas this course uses to divide the discipline, each asking its own kind of question about the same political world. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
political theory and philosophy — The subfield that asks what ought to be, such as what makes a government legitimate or a society just, and answers by careful argument. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
comparative politics — The subfield that studies how political systems work inside countries and compares them with one another to explain differences. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
international relations — The subfield that studies politics between states, including conflict, cooperation, trade, and international organizations. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
American government — The subfield that studies one country, the United States, in depth, as a single well-documented case of the discipline's concepts. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
political methodology — The subfield that supplies the tools for gathering and weighing evidence, from reading a document carefully to reading a table of data. (first used: 3. Use the five subfields as lenses on one event)
concept application — Taking a defined idea, stated precisely, and using it to sort or explain a specific case. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
argument analysis — Taking an argument apart into its claim, the premises offered for it, and the assumptions it needs, so each piece can be checked on its own. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
evidence evaluation — Asking what a document, case, or dataset actually shows, what it does not show, and whether a pattern in it is a correlation or a cause. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
comparative method — Placing a case beside one or more other cases on defined dimensions so the similarities and differences can narrow down an explanation. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
claim — A sentence that asserts something can be so or ought to be so, and that a reader can accept, reject, or question. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
premise — A claim offered as a reason for accepting another claim. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
conclusion — The claim an argument's premises are offered to support, the point the argument is trying to establish. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
unstated premise — An assumption an argument needs in order to work but never says out loud; finding one is not the same as finding a flaw. (first used: 4. Use the toolkit: four moves for any political question)
empirical claim — A claim about what is, or why something happens, that can be checked against evidence and can turn out to be false. (first used: 5. Sort claims: empirical versus normative)
normative claim — A claim about what ought to be, such as what is just or worth doing, that is defended by argument from values and premises and can be argued well or badly. (first used: 5. Sort claims: empirical versus normative)
smuggling — The failure mode of slipping an ought into a sentence that is presented as a plain statement of fact. (first used: 5. Sort claims: empirical versus normative)
shrugging — The failure mode of treating a value question as mere opinion, as if reasons and premises made no difference to how good an argument is. (first used: 5. Sort claims: empirical versus normative)

Summary

Politics is a group's binding decision under scarcity and disagreement, at any scale.
Political science starts from a question and checks answers against shared rules of evidence.
Lasswell (1936) asks who gets what, when, how; Easton (1953) names the authoritative allocation of values.
The five subfields are lenses on one event, not walls.
The toolkit is concept application, argument analysis, evidence evaluation, and the comparative method.
Sort a claim by its kind, not its topic: empirical claims are checked, normative claims are argued.
Watch for smuggling an ought inside an is, and for shrugging off a value argument.
The Declaration's second paragraph rests its normative conclusion on the consent of the governed and never names who judges.
Whether political science is a science is contested; state each side fairly and decide for yourself.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

A city has new parking rules (an illustrative scenario). Sort each claim as empirical or normative. (a) "Downtown parking now costs more per hour than it did last year." (b) "Parking should be free for nurses on night shifts." (c) "Most downtown spaces sit empty after 8 p.m." (d) "The city has a duty to keep downtown affordable for small shops."
A flyer from a tenants' group (illustrative) reads: "Our building's laundry room breaks down every month. The landlord has raised rents twice. So the landlord should replace the machines this year." Name the conclusion, the two premises, and one unstated premise.
An invented columnist writes, "The survey proves the town must build a new pool." What failure mode is this, and how would you rewrite the sentence so it keeps the empirical part and the normative part separate?
A chatbot tells you that David Easton wrote Politics: Who Gets What, When, How and that the Declaration of Independence promises "life, liberty, and property." Correct both mistakes.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

(a) Empirical: you could check last year's and this year's price signs. (b) Normative: it says what should be. It must be argued from values such as fairness to essential workers. (c) Empirical: you could count empty spaces after 8 p.m. (d) Normative: a "duty" is a claim about what ought to be. Notice that all four share one topic, parking, and still split two and two by kind.
The conclusion is "the landlord should replace the machines this year." The premises are that the laundry room breaks down every month and that the landlord has raised rents twice. One unstated premise is that higher rents create a duty to keep shared equipment working; another is that replacing the machines, rather than repairing them, is the right fix. Finding these does not sink the argument; it shows what a reader would have to accept.
This is smuggling: a must is slipped inside a proves. A survey can show what residents say they want; it cannot by itself show what the town ought to do. A better version: "The survey shows that many residents say they would use a pool (empirical). I argue the town should build one because public recreation is worth the cost (normative)."
Politics: Who Gets What, When, How is Harold Lasswell's book (1936); Easton's work is The Political System (1953), with the phrase "authoritative allocation of values". The Declaration's trio is "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"; "life, liberty, and property" is Locke's trio. A swapped thinker and a misquoted trio are two of the most common chatbot errors, so check both against the source.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week the consent standard returns as the heart of legitimacy, alongside Weber's model of three types of authority.

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