Publisher's Synopsis
The discipline of political science is more than 150 years old, though speculation about politics has been taking place for millennia. Whereas past critiques and histories of the field have opened conversations about how to improve the pathway toward making the field into a science, the present volume presents a challenge-how to overcome the present situation in which the field has become characterized as a "jigsaw puzzle," divided into small subfields with very little cross-interaction. The book starts with a description of the history and subfields of the discipline. The next sections recount well-accepted grand theories and paradigms of the past in order to encourage their further development, followed by illustrative interdisciplinary empirical tests involving political anthropology, political economy, and political sociology. Policy applications demonstrate how political scientists can influence public policy, including an exposition of a new methodology for options analysis. The purpose of the volume is to reveal how a future political science can be more integrated and respected by linking theory, research, and policy applications (theoretical science, empirical science, and applied science) together within the same scholarly studies, thereby reintegrating the profession. The book, ideal as a textbook for the profession of political science, is dedicated to David Easton, who has long sought to transcend traditional, behavioralist, and postbehavioralist political science by revitalizing the profession into a neobehavioralist future.
