Is Political Science a Science

854 Words4 Pages
According to Wikipedia, Political Science is a social science discipline that studies nations, governments and politics and the policies of government according to Wikipedia. To throw more light on the concept, politics can however be defined as the process of improving a person’s status, increasing a person’s power through debate between two powerful parties. However there isn’t a particular definition for politics even though it might seem simple. But many scholars have expressed their ideas about the meaning of it. David Easton a great scholar said that “politics is the authoritative allocation of resources”. This particular definition is backed by Harold Laswell’s definition of politics being about “who gets what, when and how”. While other scholars have backed these definitions other have leveled criticisms against them. All these gives a clear idea about what politics actually is. Science on the other hand can generally be defined as the body of knowledge obtained through observation, systematic experimentation to bring out a meaningful or universal conclusion. That is, to get a scientific conclusion, there is the need to apply a scientific method or procedure and that is what thee natural sciences entail. Series of systematic laboratory tests are ran to arrive at a universal conclusion. That is to say that, the natural sciences follows a systematic procedure in all their researches. Now as to whether political science is a science. Political science is indeed a science in its own way. This is to say that, it follows a systematic pattern in its researches to come out with its conclusions just as the natural sciences but not exactly as the natural sciences. Some renowned scholars have however backed the ideology that political science cannot be a science. They therefore subject the discipline to the practical fact that, it is
Open Document