Political Science as a Discipline: A Statement by the Committee on Standards of Instruction of the American Political Science Association

Abstract

Political science is a basic discipline in the social sciences. Although it must necessarily maintain close scholarly association with the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, geography, and social psychology, political science cannot be considered a part of any of these other social sciences. Political science has its own area of human experience to analyze, its own body of descriptive and factual data to gather, its own conceptual schemes to formulate and test for truth.