Political Science

Political science is best defined in comparison to political philosophy: one attempts to understand politics from first principles, reasoned outward, in a coherent and consistent theory; the other attempts to understand politics from observations and theories of what explains the variance therein. This page addresses the latter.

Comparative Politics

This field's methods are essentially decision trees. The body of quantitative data is poor. Analysis rests on identifying novel partitions that better predict or describe outcomes, and then re-testing hypotheses after a few decades have generated new data.

• City politics

• Critical elections theory

• Democratization

• Electoral systems

• Gini coefficient

• International development

• Issues evolution model

• Party polarization

• Relative deprivation theory

• Southern exceptionalism

Public Choice and Social Choice Theory

Public choice and social choice are highly interconnected. In general, public choice seeks to be strictly positive, while social choice leans into philosophy and normative study. Like, 'given a voting system, which agent has most control' vs. 'what is the most fair voting system'. But the theorists fundamentally speak the same language, and it's more coherent to group them together by field of study.

• Institutional design

• Median voter theorem

• Pivotal politics model

• Rational choice voting

Political Economy

• CAGE distance framework

• Outbidding

• Regulatory economics

• Wilson-Lowi matrix

International Relations

• Bargaining model of war

• Conflict theory

• Constructivism

• Institutionalism

• Rally around the flag effect

• Rationalism

• Realism

Miscellany

• Affective Polarization

• Policy analysis

• Some resources on this wiki:

  • listings of states and city-states throughout history

  • listings of current cities

  • listings of empires (including de facto empires)

Reading Notes

Note: reading notes for the above topics are listed on the respective pages, not here.

• England in the Age of the American Revolution, Lewis Namier, 1931

• The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, 1981

• Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Carl M. Brauer, 1983

• What Has Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination?, Kenneth J. Arrow. 1998

• Hard and Soft Law in International Governance, Kenneth Abbott and Duncan Snidal, 2000

• Twilight of impunity for Africa's presidential criminals, Bruce Baker, 2004

• Statistical Backwards Induction: A Simple Method for Estimating Strategic Models; Muhammet Ali Bas, Curtis S. Signorino, and Robert W. Walker; 2006

• Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans, Thomas J. Campanella, 2006

• Aloofness or Dirty Hands? Administrative Culpability in the Making of the Second Ghetto, Mohamad G. Alkadry and Brandi Blessett, 2010

• Measuring Internal Political Efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study; Richard G. Niemi, Stephen C. Craig, and Franco Mattei; 2014

• Politicians’ Theories of Voting Behavior; Jack Lucas, Lior Sheffer, Peter John Loewen, Stefaan Walgrave, Karolin Soontjens, Eran Amsalem, Stefanie Bailer, Nathalie Brack, Christian Breunig, Pirmin Bundi, Linda Coufal, Patrick Dumont, Sarah Lachance, Miguel M. Pereira, Mikael Persson, Jean-benoit Pilet, Anne Rasmussen, Maj-britt Sterba, and Frédéric Varone; 2024

• All Politics Is Local: Studying Women’s Representation in Local Politics in Authoritarian Regimes, Carolyn Barnett and Marwa Shalaby, 2024

• The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S.; Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Jonathan Renshon, Jessica L.P. Weeks, and Chagai M. Weiss; 2024

• Widening the gap of political inequality? The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on political engagement, Ana Maria Belchior, 2024

• Democracy and the Epistemic Problems of Political Polarization, Jonathan Benson, 2024

• Autocratic Policy and the Accumulation of Social Capital: The Moscow Housing Renovation Program; Ekaterina Borisova, Regina Smyth, and Alexei Zakharov; 2024

• Crisis management from a relational perspective: an analysis of interorganizational transboundary crisis networks, Carlos Bravo-Laguna, 2024

• Stance detection: a practical guide to classifying political beliefs in text, Michael Burnham, 2024

• Unconditional Loyalty: The Survival of Minority Autocracies, Salam Alsaadi, 2025

• Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System, Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman, 2025

• Are Firms Gerrymandered?; Joaquín Artés, Aaron R. Kaufman, Brian K. Richter, and Jeffrey F. Timmons; 2025

• Efficacy of Congressional Oversight, Pamela Ban and Seth J. Hill, 2025

• How Does Shaming Human Rights Violators Abroad Shape Attitudes at Home?, Lotem Bassan-Nygate, 2025

• Sustaining Exposure to Fact-Checks: Misinformation Discernment, Media Consumption, and Its Political Implications; Jeremy Bowles, Kevin Croke, Horacio Larreguy, Shelley Liu, and John Marshall; 2025

• Measuring legislators’ ideological position in large chambers using pairwise-comparisons, Christian Breunig and Benjamin Guinaudeau, 2025

• Shared Demographic Characteristics Do Not Reliably Facilitate Persuasion in Interpersonal Conversations: Evidence from Eight Experiments; David E. Broockman, Joshua L. Kalla, Nicholas Ottone, Erik Santoro, and Amanda Weiss; 2025

Data Notes

• Relevant government agencies, which link to many data notes:

  • BJS

  • BLS

  • Census Bureau

  • NCES

  • HUD

• see UMich's ISR

• ALICE Project

• ANES

• CIA World Factbook

• CSES

• EES

• ESS

• Freedom House's Freedom in the World

• GSS

• ISSP

• MIPD

• Polity

• V-Dem

• WGI

• WVS

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