Read a great article? Feel like there’s some foundation texts everyone needs to read? Want advice on what to read on any facet of Political Science? This is the place to discuss relevant literature!
Old but gold. A classic video of Professor Randall Schweller explaining Realism Theory in international relations.
How has studying political science affected your view of the world and its major issues, such as war, conflicts, competition, national and international politics? I'd love to hear your thoughts
I've become a lot more politically engaged over the past year — I follow current events, form opinions, and I genuinely enjoy discussing them. But I keep running into the same pushback from different directions.
With my parents: whenever politics comes up and I point out something factually wrong in what they're saying, it turns into a lecture. They connect my interest in politics to me not clearing NEET, saying it's a distraction. Their argument is that unless I clear something like UPSC and actually hold power, caring about politics is pointless.
With friends at my PG: a casual conversation turned political, and most of the girls didn't want to engage. Their reasoning was similar — discussing it changes nothing since we're not public figures, so it just ends up making us feel worse for no reason.
My counterargument has been that awareness matters, that movements start with ordinary people caring before anyone has formal power, and that refusing to even discuss things doesn't seem reasonable just because we're not in charge.
Honestly, what gets to me more than any single argument is just how apolitical most people around me seem to be. It's not that they disagree with me — they don't even want to engage. At my PG, the moment politics came up, it was an immediate wall: "don't discuss politics here," "not right now," "not this topic" — no one even willing to hear the sentence out. And at home, the second I bring something up, I'm treated like I'm talking nonsense, like I'm just a distracted kid who should shut up and study.
It genuinely makes me sad. This is a country of over a billion people, and it sometimes feels like almost no one wants to actually sit with an uncomfortable topic for five minutes. Caring is treated like the weird thing, and not caring is treated like the mature, responsible default.
The one person who doesn't make me feel this way is my boyfriend. He's someone who actually stays engaged with what's happening around him and cares when people are being hurt or treated unfairly. Talking to him about this stuff feels different — like the caring itself isn't something I have to justify or defend. It's made me realize how rare that is, and how much most of my other conversations feel like I'm the problem just for wanting to talk.
So yeah — maybe I'm asking two questions now: is their "you have no power so why bother" argument reasonable? And separately — am I wrong to feel this disheartened by how few people even want to have the conversation at all?
I've been building a public dashboard that treats the 296 sitting members of South Korea's National Assembly as a graph, and infers edges between them from Korean-language news coverage rather than from roll-call votes. It's live and open source, and I'd genuinely like this sub to poke holes in the method.
What the graph contains right now — 296 Member nodes, 8 Party nodes, 296 affiliation edges, 39 directed sentiment edges (36 conflict, 3 alliance), 368 co-mention edges.
How edges are derived — A nightly job pulls articles from the politics, economy, and society sections of a major Korean news portal and resolves which legislators are named. Name resolution took the most work: Korean given names are short and frequently appear inside unrelated words, so I use longest-match masking plus a boundary check rather than substring matching.
Two different time bases, deliberately — the design decision I'd most like feedback on:
- Relations are cumulative. A conflict, once observed, is never dropped.
- Attention is a 7-day rolling window. News mentions plus log-normalized YouTube views.
Mixing a cumulative measure and a rolling one in one view risks misreading, so each panel carries its window as a visible label and a tooltip. I'm not sure that's sufficient.
Attention scoring — YouTube views are log-compressed (1k → 0, 10M → 100) before being added to the news component, and an article naming n legislators contributes 1/√n to each, so roundup pieces don't inflate everyone equally.
Where I know it's weak — the dataset is new (collection started 2026-08-30, so "cumulative" is days, not years); no inter-coder reliability on the sentiment edges; one news portal; coverage ≠ influence; conflict outnumbers alliance 36:3, which may be real or may be an extraction artifact.
What I'd like input on —
(1) Is media co-occurrence defensible as a complement to vote-based measures like W-NOMINATE, or is coverage bias fatal?
(2) What's the minimum validation before sentiment edges count as data — a hand-coded n=200 with reported kappa?
(3) Has anyone handled the cumulative-vs-rolling presentation problem well?
As an international student that wants to study international relations in Europe or America, I have no idea what universities to consider. All research I do seems to lead me in a loop with conflicting testimonies both from people and websites, and even from alumni of prestigious universities. I also have very little perspective on my personal desirability for universities, being fluent in English, passing 8 AP exams and having a 1450+ on the SAT as well as basically the equivalent of a 4.0 GPA in my own country whilst lacking in extracurricular activities.
What universities would you guys recommend, both for a good education and for finding a well paying job?
hello, I'm sorry if this isn't the right subreddit and would be grateful if someone would guide me to the right one if it isn't so but I'm desperate rn
I really wanted to pursue pol science for my bachelor's, then masters and PhD to ultimately go into teaching in any scandinavian country. the situation in my country is bleak when it comes to pol sci education (and rights in general for people like me), and if I don't go abroad for masters, I'll just get married off which I do not want. my girlfriend and I have a whole plan for masters but I know I want it in pol sci alone.
my parents have currently forced me to do law and it is eating away at me bcs I know it's not something I want to do. is there anyone in professoral teaching in a scandinavian country right now who could guide me as to how everything would work later down the line so that I can convince my parents?
thank you so much, and apologies if there're any grammatical errors; english is most definitely not my first language
Iam studying in 12 grade and am from india i like politics and i like to pursue political science so all i have heard that after taking political science that we can do only teaching and preparing for govt exams in india so i started to discover careers in political science so i heard about political consultant and political analyst and international relations so is this real i never heard of such jobs so somebody explain to me how can we get to these kind of jobs and have a good career
So, for context, I recently graduated from a prestigious university with a masters' in political science. However, I feel that in this economy especially, I need to branch out to other fields a little bit to make myself more marketable beyond government-related jobs and the public sector.
Given finance and business tend, at least in my experience, to be a somewhat popular career choice for Political Science majors (and those in the social sciences/humanities in general), I was wondering if anyone had advice on how to make that transition and gain skills that would make employers in these field more attuned to my resume without getting another degree. Is Udemy and other certification websites - e.g. Google, even - the right way forward here or should I just blindly apply for business internships at various companies hoping that one eventually sticks, despite me not necessarily having the standard credentials. Appreciate your time and advice in advance.
hi guys! im in my second year of cc as a government major (planning to switch to poli sci), but i would like some experiences in my field, my school doesn't really offer much, and ive spent the whole summer searching and applying. yet, nothing pulled through. I was wondering if perhaps i could find some suggestions on where else to look or what to look for. i only have experience as an intern from two years ago, and my current job (cashier). i've checked local law firms but there is only sooo much in houston that are actually opened to hiring someone like me! i want to be a lawyer, and be very hands on with politics especially in my city, so if anyone could direct me that would be amazing! i have also checked volunteering with my local government, but for some reason it seems everything is so coded and hidden? maybe its something im doing wrong?
Hi everyone! I am a political science student and am taking my first course in political methodology this fall. I am not very good at math so naturally I am a little worried. Does anyone have any tips on how to prepare for this type of course? What to expect? I took a statistics course online a few semesters ago. But like I said I’m not a math person so I’m not sure how much I’ll actually remember. I know the course is difficult so I’m trying to mentally prepare myself. Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Hello everyone, I'm currently an undergraduate student pursuing bachelors degrees in Political Science and Philosophy (second year polisci and second year philosophy). I'm a very good student scoring marks at the very top of my class in both disciplines. I am absolutely sure that academia is for me and it would be a dream for me to pursue a PhD in The United States.
What are some things that I can do to make my application as competitive as possible (I think two degrees is a nice plus)?
I'm mostly interested in political theory, which universities have the strongest programmes in that field?
What are some things that I should know about studying in The US as an European?
Hi! I’m a student interested in potentially pursuing a career in geopolitical risk analysis, and I’m planning to apply for a BSc in International Relations.
I’d love to hear from anyone currently working in the field:
What was your educational/career journey like?
How did you get into the industry?
What do you like/dislike about the job?
What does your day-to-day work look like?
Is there anything you wish you knew before getting into it?
I’m mainly looking for honest experiences, both good and bad, to help me decide if this is something I’d actually want to pursue. Thanks!
Hi everyone, I’m currently a sophomore in college and debating on what to do after my bachelors. Do people who have pursued a masters or PhD enjoy their career, or should I just stick to law school afterwards?
I’m interested in whether there is a structural explanation for this historical pattern.
Many communist dictatorships combined one-party political monopoly with state control over major economic resources, workplaces, unions and social organisations. Many capitalist dictatorships suppressed political competition while leaving more economic and social activity outside direct state control.
Linz distinguishes authoritarian regimes, which can tolerate limited pluralism, from totalitarian regimes seeking much deeper control over society (Linz, 2000). Kornai argues that classical communist systems linked one-party rule with bureaucratic control of the economy (Kornai, 1992).
So could ownership structure be part of the explanation?
When political power and most economic resources are concentrated in the same party-state, does dictatorship become more likely to expand toward totalitarian control?
Or is Leninist party organisation the more important variable?
References
Kornai, J. (1992). The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton University Press.
Linz, J. J. (2000). Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Lynne Rienner.
I haven't been a huge political buff for most of my life like some people, but I want my opinion on political ideologies to be actually educated. I'm tired of hearing takes such as "communism = communal tooth brush" or "capitalism = everyone get rich", so I want to read read and educate myself as much as possible on politics beyond my own. Of course with theory comes figures for these ideologies, I can probably do my own research on the figures once I read the theory.
Why? I've seen people tell land defenders to stop making everything political and I genuinely don't get it; the government approves, for example, an oil pipeline that will likely destroy the local drinking water for several towns: is water not political? Are the myriad of school shootings in the States not political due to decades of inaction? In my opinion if a thing can be impacted by government action or inaction said thing is political, it may not necessarily be partisan but it is political
Revolutions, whether violent or non-violent, are inherently rare, risky endeavors. Extremely high risk, extremely low probability of success, but proportional rewards if successful. Given the increasingly dysfunctional status of political systems in many western nations, questions surrounding changing those systems are inevitable.
Academics have written quite a bit about revolutions, but I'm not interested in what they think. I am looking for a casual conversation with a normal human regarding what it would take for you personally to call for whole-system political change. Is there a line in the sand for you, which if crossed, compels you to adopt a revolutionary political stance?
Is the line the same for both violent and non-violent revolution? Is your revolutionary line one thing, one action, event, or variable, or would you need a collection of things, a pattern of smaller lines being crossed? And if not, if there is nothing your government can do to make you advocate for replacing it entirely, why?
Naturally, given that revolutions are often bloody, violent affairs, it is worth explicitly stating that this post is categorically opposed to violence in any way, shape, or form. The purposes of this post are to generate a discussion about hypothetical boundaries that common people have on political system change.
I built a tool that lets people vote on real congressional bills and compare how their own House rep and Senators voted. What surprised me from early usage was most people are less aligned with their representatives than they assume - including people who voted for them.
That raises a question: if voters had easy access to their rep's actual voting record, would it change how they vote? Or is party identity strong enough that voting records barely factors in? Curious what this sub thinks.
Ola hoje quero perguntar como posso chegar a chefe de estado e espanhar as minhas ideias de direita radical ah e claro eu chumbei em artes brincadeiras a parte como se torna se mesmo um chefe de estado
