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After a close association in the first half of the 20th century, during the 1970s the political science & history disciplines parted company: political science embraced behavioral analysis of narrow questions & historians lost interest in government institutions & public policy. However, in the 1980s & 1990s, the field of American Political Development gained in popularity among political scientists who pursued broader historical questions, eg, Progressive Era reform, the New Deal, etc. Institutional political historians emerged to tackle issues surrounding law & public policy & the development of the modern administrative state. The exciting connections between political science & history should not be limited to American Political Development, however. Examples of other scholarship examining the connections are reviewed, eg, in civic participation, the relationship between race & politics, international political economy, & the philosophy of history. Each discipline still has its unique approach but for the study of politics, an understanding of the other is of great benefit. M. Pflum

"This Element denaturalizes political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider modernism that replaced earlier developmental narratives with more formal explanations. It changed as some scholars yoked together behavioural topics, quantitative techniques, and positivist theory, and as other scholars rejected their doing so. Subfields such as international relations remained semi-detached and focussed on policy as much as theory. Furthermore, the shifting fashions within political science - modernism, behaviouralism, realism, neoliberalism, the new institutionalism - have informed the policies by which governments have tried to tame contingency and govern people"--

Regards the study of politics not so much as a discipline with a distinctive method but more as a field of study which is amenable to various approaches. Suggests that the contribution of history has been more a body of knowledge than a set of methods. (SJK)