Characteristics Of Political Science

Political scientists study the origin, development, and operation of political systems, and complex social organizations. They research political ideas and analyze governments, policies, political trends, and related issues. A political scientist is different from a political philosopher who explains theoretically the consistency of power, its acquisition and its proper use to preserve it. Political scientists are also different from politicians who are the practitioners of the public administration and holders of power. Thus, the political scientist is fundamentally an analyst and researcher of how political philosophers and politicians shape the human societies through their actions and ideas as reflected in policies and structures of power.

B. Watson, I am a person who likes to decode the human nature through the human expressions or behavior. In this sense I am a behavioral and phenomenological political analyst. I enjoy identifying patterns of words and actions; I think that there is a sort of praxeological grammar in our behavior that is not prescriptive but descriptive. As a political science student I use different sorts of sources, from statistics and raw data, to scientific articles, legal codes, historic records, literature and museums to understand human political action on a scale larger than the individual. I like to compare countries and to detect that even though they have different cultures and paradigms, they follow some similar patters regarding concrete issues, such as the popular election of dictators and the creation of economic bubbles. These are events that have an explanation not in the event itself, but in the surrounding elements that made those events an unavoidable and irresistible fate, these are behavioral conditionings that explain people’s reactions to certain stimuli. The behavior is produced by a chain of human actions and collective decisions made by individuals who thought themselves to be free to act by their own initiative while stimulated by forces that led them to make those ‘free’ decisions. In this way, our ‘free will’ is just a conditioned response to a certain stimulus, as Skinner

The French existentialists, such as J. P. Sartre, used to say that we are what we do, that existing means doing consciously. It is true that our actions show eloquently who we are, however our actions are the external wave not the inner current. I learned in this course that our actions are the product of biochemical processes in our brain, and not only our actions but our perceptions, representations, and associations. All of this is at play when we interact with others in one particular way among many possible ways to do it. To predict what kind of interaction both agents will have, it is important to study their psychology. We are nothing but our mind. I have found Psychology to be my intimate friend to analyze political decisions, actions, and discourses. I thought that to understand the moves of the players it was enough to know the rules of the game, it is to say, the laws and the constitution that shape the framework within which the players act. I was mistaken. It is not sufficient to know just those rules, what really matters are the inner processes of the players that occur regardless the legal framework. Psychology has provided me this essential key to understand a little bit more of this humanity I myself am part of. I repeat with Descartes that I think, therefore I exist; but now after