Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Understand that you are welcomed to become a part of this increasingly diverse disciplinary community
Welcome to political science: the scientific study of who gets what, when, where, how, and why. But political science is more than the study of political behaviors, processes, and institutions. Political science is a scholarly community of students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who deeply care about promoting the generation, dissemination, and application of knowledge to improve our understanding of politics and solve public problems. And you are warmly welcomed to learn more about this increasing diverse and lively community that resides all over the planet.
Political science is a relatively new scholarly community, with the national American Political Science Association (APSA) having been established at the turn of last century in 1903. Over the last 116 years, the discipline has dramatically evolved. From early efforts to establish the discipline as a bulwark for inspiring a democratically minded public, to pioneering innovations in political institutions and processes, the community has maintained a constant effort to understand, and in ways shape, politics. And in its formative years, the discipline sought to differentiate itself from the fields of history and economics. As the first generation of political scientists were trained, the roots of political science as a “borrowing” discipline were established.
For the students of today, what does it mean for political science to be a “borrowing” (Dogan 1996) discipline? It means that while political science has core tenets, theories, and ways of analyzing the political world, it also does its best to utilize and leverage knowledge from a range of other fields: history, economics, psychology, sociology, statistics, anthropology, computer science, mathematics, cognitive science, and even biology. Additionally, these fields can borrow from political science as well. For example, there is an entire field of political economics that compares market-based systems with government-run systems. Therefore, students with a diversity of intellectual interests can explore them through the borrowing framework core to political science.
The evolution of political science is driven by teachers and researchers who hold a commitment to professing and studying politics. But it is important to highlight, that current teachers and researchers started as students, just like you, who were eager to learn more about their government, to understand different political systems, and to explore the world beyond their borders. With each new generation of political science students, educators, and researchers in colleges and universities, new voices begin to shape the discipline in expected and unexpected ways.
This book, Introduction to Political Science Research Methods (IPSRM), is an Open Education Resource (OER) written by community college faculty and financially supported by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC). The purpose of this book is three-fold: introduce college students to research methods of political science; provide a no-cost textbook for adoption by faculty and use by students; and invite faculty and students to contribute to the improvement of the book with their own contribution.
Students are the future of any academic discipline and scholarly community. In many ways, how students of political science are educated now will shape the discipline for generations to come. Thus, a no-cost textbook that introduces students to the research methods in political science comes an important time in the discipline’s history. As advanced democracies are strained by right-wing populist movements promoting austerity (Erel 2018), a rise in inequality that manifests itself in students struggling with food and housing insecurity (Broton and GoldrickRab 2018), and a Big Data revolution upending industries and displacing workers (Frank, Roehrig, and Pring 2017; Peters 2017), there is a clear need for all political science students to have access to learning about the methods used by our discipline to create new knowledge in the field. It is important to empower current students and future researchers with the tools to creatively grapple with the trends and challenges facing societies and governments.
Faculty, both teachers and researchers, have the dual task: welcoming students to the discipline and imparting knowledge of political behaviors, processes, and institutions to create a publicly spirited and scholarly minded and civically engaged public. While most students in colleges and universities will only take one course in political science, largely to fulfill a social science or national government requirement, there will be a fraction who choose to continue their study of political science because something sparked their interest. This spark is, we hope, turns into a gleaming shine that motivates students to shape their political institutions and processes at the subnational, national, and global level. As faculty, our dual task is one we embrace. And what this textbook provides is an introduction to research methods, a growing part of the core of our discipline.
Lastly, as this is an Open Education Resource, you, whether student or teacher or researcher, are wholeheartedly welcomed and invited to contribute to its improvement. Whether you find a grammatical error, feel that a chapter section needs clarification, we overlook underrepresented communities or voices in the examples we use, or that we are missing an entire topic, you are welcomed to contribute. As a Creative Commons with Attribution and Non-Commercial (CCBY-NC) license, you can expand our this textbook and make it your own.
