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Political science has its laws, and they can predict what will happen in politics. One such law can predict whether George Bush will be reelected President in 1992.It is true that political science is not politics. This relationship between the two is no different than that between any science and the reality which it analyzes. Every science is a repository of abstractions which model the critical aspects of a much more complex underlying phenomena. While some political scientists have expected a one-to-one, deterministic relationship between the science and the material it studied, most anticipated the "deterministic randomness" (or "chaos") paradigm becoming popular even in the physical sciences today. Deterministic, because the science assumes that there are intrinsic underlying laws; but random because, with the inherent complexity, much will necessarily remain unpredictable (in statistical terms, that there always will be an "e" in the equation).

It has now been four years of contested elections for the Council of
the Association. In this note we ask: What can we learn about these
elections from a political science perspective?

To a substantial extent, political scientists continue to be in a state of shock, or even denial, over the results of the November 1994 mid-term elections. This degree of surprise has been largely attributed to the failure of the 1994 elections to conform to numerous models that have successfully predicted past election results on the basis of some combination of presidential popularity and economic performance. In a broader sense, it has become fashionable to argue alternately that the voters weren't really saying anything, or that they did not know what they were saying, or that they were saying things not fit for polite company—angry, mean, and even racist things. Such an interpretation does a disservice both to our profession and to our friends and neighbors, the real people who cast those votes.It will be some time before we are able to untangle the factors that led to the Republican sweep and to see whether it was a short-term aberration or the beginning of a long-term trend in congressional elections. Nevertheless, I would like to offer a two-part explanation for the results and the consequent academic confusion: the election models that we use as both a tool and a crutch are at the same time not precise enough and too precise.They are not precise enough because they do not capture all that needs to be taken into account even on the dimensions of the economy and presidential popularity.

PROFESSOR LAZARSFELD ONCE REFERRED TO SOCIOLOGY AS BEING IN A sense a residuary legatee, the surviving part of a very general study, out of which specializations have successively been shaped.The same might be said of political science. In the West the first deliberate and reflective studies of political life were made in Greece at the end of the th century BC, and in the succeeding century. The histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, some of the pamphlets attributed to Xenophon, above all the normative and empirical studies of Plato and Aristotle were among the direct ancestors of contemporary political science. Parallel examples are to be found in the intellectual history of China, India and Islam. It seems that at certain stages in the development of great societies questions of legitimacy, power and leadership assume supreme importance; and intense intellectual effort, using the best analytical tools available, is devoted to the study of man as brought to a focus in the study of politics.

AbstractDemocratic governance has been a central tenant of leadership development in U.S. political science departments. The discipline of political science focuses on the development of engaged citizens and responsible leaders who can have a positive impact in their communities at all levels.