Political science, a core discipline in the study of human
behavior, is devoted to analysis and understanding of the political
life of the world’s peoples and polities. Disciplinary inquiry
addresses significant political and governmental questions of our time
as well as from the past and for the future. The topics that engage
political scientists range from conditions of peace and war among
nations to conflict and consensus within nations and groups. They
encompass efforts to understand public preferences and choices, the
policy-making process, the adjudication of law, and how and why
political institutions and rules change. The discipline examines
governments, political institutions, leaders, and ordinary citizens in
both democracies and autocracies, and it addresses normative questions
about political ideals and empirical questions about how well they are
realized. Political scientists draw upon the full range of analytical
techniques from the social sciences, behavioral sciences, and
humanities to study these topics. Such approaches have made political
science a particularly rich and important discipline, and inherently
interdisciplinary.
The Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University is
a national and international leader in its discipline. In the most
recent authoritative National Research Council study, the department
ranked 17th among research universities in faculty quality and 7th
overall among the public research universities. Its major fields enjoy
widespread reputations for the quality of their faculty. In the most
recent (1998) U.S. News and World Report survey, American
politics at Ohio State was ranked 6th (2nd among public universities),
its international politics field 11th (3rd among publics), and its
comparative politics field 17th (7th among publics). Other measures of
quality and reputation consistently place the department at this
level, and sometimes even higher in recent years.
The department also plays a central role on this campus. It
educates large numbers of undergraduate and graduate students, among
them many of the university’s very best. With only about 30
faculty, it teaches over 6,000 undergraduates per year and enrolls
around 500 majors, about 100 of whom are in the university-wide Honors
program. Its former undergraduate majors have gone on to the best law
schools and graduate programs in the nation and to assume important
roles in business and government in Ohio, the nation, and the world.
The department has over 100 Ph.D. students and is one of the
university leaders in the number of them winning prestigious Graduate
School and Presidential Fellowships. Its Ph.D.’s hold positions
in leading research universities, liberal arts colleges, government,
private, and public research institutes, and institutions of higher
learning throughout Ohio. On this campus, the department’s
faculty and students also make significant contributions to the
research and educational activities of the Mershon Center, the Center
for Survey Research, the Cognitive Science Program, the Undergraduate
International Studies Program, the College of Law’s Center for
Law, Policy, and Social Science, and other departments in the social
and behavioral sciences and beyond. Political science faculty are
involved in educational and outreach activities throughout Ohio, the
nation, and the world and will be key participants in the programs of
Ohio State’s new John Glenn Institute.
The department’s selective investment plan is built around the
hiring of a mix of eminent established scholars and promising new
scholars so that its faculty size and number of senior faculty will be
commensurate with those of the nation’s top political science
departments. The goal is to move toward and into the top 10 of
political science departments by protecting its high national standing
in the American politics field, which attracts the plurality of its
undergraduate and graduate students, and enhancing its already strong
international relations and comparative politics fields. The
department also proposes to strengthen itself in political theory, of
both the formal and normative varieties, in ways that directly support
its three major fields.
