Definition: Political science is the academic subject centering on the relations between governments and other governments, and between governments and peoples.

While the study of politics is first found in ancient Greece and ancient India, political science is a late arrival in terms of social sciences. However, the discipline has a clear set of antecedents such as moral philosophy, political philosophy, political economy, history, and other fields concerned with normative determinations of what ought to be and with deducing the characteristics and functions of the ideal state. In each historic period and in almost every geographic area, we can find someone studying politics and increasing political understandi

[edit] Modern political science
The advent of political science as a university discipline in the United States is evidenced by the naming of university departments and chairs with the title of political science shortly before the Civil War. In 1857, Francis Lieber was named the first Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia University. In 1880, Columbia formed the first School of Political Science. The discipline established the American Political Science Association in 1903. Integrating political studies of the past into a unified discipline is an ongoing project, and the history of political science has provided a rich field for the growth of both normative and positive political science, with each part of the discipline sharing some historical predecessors.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, a behavioral revolution stressing the systematic and rigorously scientific study of individual and group behavior swept the discipline. At the same time that political science moved toward greater depth of analysis and more sophistication, it also moved toward a closer working relationship with other disciplines, especially sociology, economics, history, anthropology, psychology, and statistics. Increasingly, students of political behavior have used the scientific method to create an intellectual discipline based on the postulating of hypotheses followed by empirical verification and the inference of political trends, and of generalizations that explain individual and group political actions. Over the past generation, the discipline placed an increasing emphasis on relevance, or the use of new approaches and methodologies to solve political and social problems.

In 2000, the so-called Perestroika Movement in political science was introduced as a reaction against what supporters of the movement called the mathematicization of political science. Perestroikans argued for a plurality of methodologies and approaches in political science and for more relevance of the discipline to those outside of it (Chronicle of Higher Education 2001).