Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws.
Communication studies is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with a political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship; a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification with, a political party; a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party from election to election; or a voter who self-describes as an independent.
Peter Carl Ordeshook is an American political scientist. He is the Mary Stillman Harkness Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. From 1947 to 1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
James H. Fowler is an American social scientist specializing in social networks, cooperation, political participation, and genopolitics. He is currently Professor of Medical Genetics in the School of Medicine and Professor of Political Science in the Division of Social Science at the University of California, San Diego. He was named a 2010 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Experimental political science is the use of experiments, which may be natural or controlled, to implement the scientific method in political science.
Mathew Daniel McCubbins was the Ruth F. De Varney Professor of Political Science and professor of law, in the Department of Political Science and School of Law at Duke University.
Networks in electoral behavior, as a part of political science, refers to the relevance of networks in forming citizens’ voting behavior at parliamentary, presidential or local elections. There are several theories emphasizing different factors which may shape citizens' voting behavior. Many influential theories ignore the possible influence of individuals' networks in forming vote choices and focus mainly on the effects of own political attitudes – such as party loyalties or party identification developed in childhood proposed by the Michigan model, or on the influence of rational calculations about the political parties’ ideological positions as proposed by spatial and valence theories. These theories offer models of electoral behavior in which individuals are not analyzed within their social networks and environments. In a more general context, some authors warn that the hypothesis testing done mainly based on sample surveys and focused on individuals’ attributes without looking at relational data seems to be a poor methodological instrument. However, models emphasizing the influence of individuals’ social networks in shaping their electoral choices have been also present in the literature from the very beginning.
Bureaucratic drift in American political science is a theory that seeks to explain the tendency for bureaucratic agencies to create policy that deviates from the original mandate. The difference between a bureaucracy's enactment of a law and the legislature's intent is called bureaucratic drift. Legislation is produced by elected officials, but is implemented by unelected bureaucrats, who sometimes act under their own preferences or interests. Bureaucratic drift is often treated as a principal–agent problem, with the House, Senate and Presidency acting as principals and bureaucracy acting as the agent. The government seeks to control bureaucratic drift in a number of ways, most notably congressional oversight and procedural controls.
Donald Philip Green is a political scientist and quantitative methodologist at Columbia University. Green's primary research interests lie in the development of statistical methods for field experiments and their application to American voting behavior.
Tali Mendelberg is the John Work Garrett Professor in Politics at Princeton University, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and director of the Program on Inequality at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and winner of the American Political Science Association (APSA), 2002 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award for her book, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality.
Simine Vazire is Professor of Psychology Ethics and Wellbeing at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She was formerly Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a social and personality psychologist who studies how self-perception and self-knowledge influence one's personality and behavior. She obtained a PhD in the social and personality psychology program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Henry Eugene Brady is an American political scientist specializing in methodology and its application in a diverse array of political fields. He was Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley from 2009–2021 and holds the Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy. He was elected President of the American Political Science Association, 2009–2010, giving a presidential address entitled "The Art of Political Science: Spatial Diagrams as Iconic and Revelatory." He has published academic works on diverse topics, co-authoring with colleagues at a variety of institutions and ranks, as well as many solo authored works. His principal areas of research are on political behavior in the United States, Canada, and the former Soviet Union, public policy and methodological work on scaling and dimensional analysis. When he became President of the American Political Science Association, a number of his colleagues and co-authors contributed to his presidential biography entitled "Henry Brady, Big Scientist," discussing his work and the fields to which he has contributed and has also shaped.
Rebecca Morton was an American political scientist. She was Professor of Political Science at New York University New York and New York University Abu Dhabi.
Lawrence R. Jacobs is an American political scientist and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance (CSPG) at the University of Minnesota. He was appointed the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2005 and holds the McKnight Presidential Chair. Jacobs has written or edited, alone or collaboratively, 17 books and over 100 scholarly articles in addition to numerous reports and media essays on American democracy, national and Minnesota elections, political communications, health care reform, and economic inequality. His latest book is Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Neil Malhotra is an American political economist. He is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he is also the Louise and Claude N. Rosenbrg, Jr. Director of the Center for Social Innovation. He studies the politics of the United States, survey methodology, and voter behavior in elections, including work on retrospective voting and disaster preparedness and relief politics.
James H. Kuklinski is an American political scientist.
James N. Druckman is an American political scientist who was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
Issue ownership is a concept in political science that states that a political party owns an issue if it is perceived by voters as the most competent party to solve a particular problem. According to the concept, a party does better if issues they own play a major role in the election campaign.
