Political Science Department

Do your parents and friends complain that you never stop talking about politics? Do you stay up late to watch election returns? If so, you may belong in a political science department, where our goal is to create and disseminate new knowledge about politics and political processes. What is politics? The ancient Greeks, who invented democracy, defined the polis as the arena in the life of the city state where persons came after the economic activities of the market to ask questions about the "good life" and to seek authoritative answers to those questions. If this is right, then politics is those ennobling deliberations about the good life that seek to resolve our differences and conflicts that arise from differences of opinions.

Political Science has evolved into an organized discipline that studies and describes politics in all of its aspects and in all of its manifestations. The widely recognized subfields include international politics (the study of politics between nation states), comparative politics (the study of similarities and differences between political systems), American National Government (the study of US institutions in their cultural and legal contexts), and political philosophy (the search for political wisdom that arises from asking philosophical questions about politics).

Other areas of study, not uniformly recognized as distinct subfields but integral parts of the discipline include: sexual politics, political economy, state and local government, conflict resolution, peace studies, environmental politics, political behavior, biopolitics, political development, and various area studies (Asian politics, Latin American Studies, European politics, African politics). It is closely tied to sociology (the study of society, its structures and functions), economics (which emerged from political economy), philosophy, and history.

In the Liberal Arts tradition associated with Jesuit education, all majors in political science at the University of Scranton are educated to live well. But since an integral part of living well is making a productive contribution to the world, our majors are also expected to bring this wisdom to bear on practical problems. These double goals require, first, that our majors are exposed to the wide breadth of knowledge that all educated persons are expected to have integrated into their being, especially that humanistic body of wisdom associated with a way of life rooted in a belief that sound values transcend the materialism of today's world. They are trained to think clearly, logically, and critically. Then, second, we seek to assure that our students are also well prepared for the work world. We strive to prepare our graduates for success in public service as well as for further study in legal, professional, and graduate programs. The skills acquired in our programs make our graduates valuable in governmental and other public service positions, in journalism, and in private industry. Many have gone on to respectable jobs in public service, others work in commercial and financial firms in the private sector, while still others have done well in some of the premier graduate and professional programs in the country. We continue to take pride in our success in preparing students for the legal profession and in placing them in quality law schools (visit the link to "Legal Study") as well as in the success graduates of this University have had in seeking Fulbright grants for study abroad.