It was always the coolest sounding major, Poli Sci. Political Science is composed of seven different fields: Political Theory, American Politics, Public Law (my personal favorite), Public Policy, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Methodology. Long ago, the Department of Political Science in your favorite university was probably referred to as the Department of Government. In an effort to get more systematic in the analysis of political phenomena, they adopted the name Political Science. Some Departments like Virginia, Harvard, and Princeton have kept their maiden name.
 

This is Ambroglio Lorenzetti's "The Effects of Good Government in the City" from Siena. The people are happy, content, and safe because of their government. It was painted in the seat of government in 1339. Because Lorenzetti did not have national health care, he is believed to have died in 1348, a victim of the Black Plague. To see more of the fresco, return to the home page.
 

Here are some websites for those interested in Political Science as a discipline or a potential career

The University of Michigan has an excellent resource center on the web. It contains links to data and all sorts of information. You can link to various fields of political science and related fields. There are linkages to governments, think tanks, and statistics galore.

As does the Vanderbilt University site. This site links you with a number of different general resources and resourses and sites specific to the various areas of political science.

The Ultimate Political Science Links Page can take you to a variety of sourses of information about the discipline, links to news sources, discussions of areas of study, and even a section for that hard to find political science humor.
 

If you are interested in graduate school in Political Science, the National Political Index can connect you to most of the major Ph.D. programs in the country. It also has a wide variety of different resources linked to it.
 
 

This is the "Effects of Good Government in the Countryside" also found in the Palazzo Publicco in Siena.
 
 

The American Political Science Association is the national organization for the discipline.

The Midwest Political Science Association is the largest regional organization.

The Southern Political Science Association is another major regional organization, which is run out of the Department here at Georgia Southern.

Each of these websites has information about that organization, its annual meeting, its publications, careers and opportunities in Political Science, and links to other websites.
 
 

This is "The Effects of Bad Government in the Countryside" by Lorenzetti. Here houses burn, the hordes attack unimpeded, the land is barren, and empty and strewn with the rubble that comes from the corruption of bad government. The mural for Bad Government has been tampered with over the years as various officials tried to erase it, perhaps so the people would not connect their sitting government with the picture.
 

This is the famous Leviathan, representing big government