---
title: "History of political science"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_political_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:09.735930+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Canada ====
Canadian universities until the 1950s were led by British trained scholars for whom political science was not a high priority. Canadians favoured  the study of political economy. After 1950 younger scholars increasingly took American PhDs and Canadian departments promoted behavioralism and quantification.

==== Europe ====
Political science operates on a smaller scale in European universities compared to American ones.  Traditionally political studies were handled by law professors or professors of philosophy. American impulses toward behavioralism have made the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) is a unifying force.  It sponsors several scholarly journals including  European Political Science (EPS) (since 2001), European Journal of Political Research (EJPR) and European Political Science Review (EPSR).

==== Soviet Union ====
In the Soviet Union, political studies were carried out under the guise of some other disciplines like theory of state and law, area studies, international relations, studies of labor movement, "critique of bourgeois theories", etc. Soviet scholars were represented at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) since 1955 (since 1960 by the Soviet Association of Political and State Studies).
In 1979, the 11th World Congress of IPSA took place in Moscow. Until the late years of the Soviet Union, political science as a field was subjected to tight control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was thus subjected to distrust. Communists accused political scientists of being "false" scientists and of having served the old regime.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, two of the major institutions dealing with political science, the Institute of Contemporary Social Theories and the Institute of International Affairs, were disbanded, and most of their members were left without jobs. These institutes were victims of the first wave of anticommunist opinion and ideological attacks. Today, the Russian Political Science Association unites professional political scientists from all around Russia.

== See also ==
History of political philosophy
Political science

== Notes ==

== Further reading ==
Adcock, Robert. Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges Since 1880 (Princeton University Press, 2007). online Archived 2016-03-08 at the Wayback Machine
Adcock, Robert. Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Almond, Gabriel A. 1996. "Political Science: A History of the Discipline", pp. 50–96 in Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (eds.), A New Handbook of Political Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Almond, Gabriel A. Ventures in Political Science: Narratives and Reflections. (Rienner, 2002)
Almond, Gabriel A., ed. A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (1989) excerpt and text search
Baer, Michael A., Malcolm E. Jewell and Lee Sigelman (eds.) Political Science in America: Oral Histories of a Discipline (University Press of Kentucky 1991) online Archived 2016-03-09 at the Wayback Machine
Crick, Bernard. The American Science of Politics. (1960)
Easton, David, John G. Gunnell, and Luigi Graziano, editors. The Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey. (Routledge, 1991). online Archived 2016-03-26 at the Wayback Machine
Easton, David, John G. Gunnell, and Michael B. Stein, editors. Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science. (University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Eulau, Heinz. The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (1963)
Farr, James and Raymond Seidelman. Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1992).
Garson, George David. Group Theories of Politics. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1978.
Goodin, Robert E. ed. The Oxford Handbook of Political Science (2010) excerpt and text search; a one volume version of 10 vol. Oxford Handbooks of Political Science listing
Goodin, R. E.; Klingemann, Hans-Dieter (eds.). A New Handbook of Political Science. (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Gunnell, John G. Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2004).
Karl, Barry Dean. Charles E. Merriam and the study of politics (1974) the standard scholarly biography
Klingemann, Hans-Dieter, ed. The State of Political Science in Western Europe. (Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2007). Long essays on each country excerpt and text search
Klosko, George, ed. Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (2012)
Lipset, Seymour Martin, ed. Politics and the Social Sciences (Oxford U.P., 1969)
Marenco, André. "The Three Achilles' Heels of Brazilian Political Science". Brazilian Political Science Review 8.3 (2014): 3–38. online
Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. Perestroika!: The Raucus Rebellion in Political Science. (Yale University Press, 2005)
Ryan, Alan. On Politics, a new history of political philosophy (2 vol 2012), 1152pp, Herodotus to the present
Seidelman, Raymond and Harpham, Edward J. Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1985.
Utter, Glenn H. and Lockhart, Charles. American Political Scientists: A Dictionary (2nd ed. Greenwood Press, 2002). summary of the work of 193 scholars online Archived 2016-03-08 at the Wayback Machine
The Evolution of Political Science Archived 2015-04-05 at the Wayback Machine (November 2006). APSR Centennial Volume of American Political Science Review. Apsanet.org. 4 February 2009.
See Ronald T. Libby, "The Death of Political Science and Rebirth of Politics" 2022.