Introduction to Political Science

Citation

Rom, M. C., Hidaka, M., & Walker, R. B. (2022). Introduction to Political Science. OpenStax. Free official edition: https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science

Chapter Summary

Chapter 1: What Is Politics and What Is Political Science?

The opening chapter defines politics as the way societies settle who gets what, when, where, how and why, and frames political events as the product of rules, the reality of the political environment and the choices actors make. It introduces public policy, the public interest, power, sovereignty, authority and legitimacy, then separates normative political science (what politics should be, argued through consequences, rules or virtue) from empirical political science (how politics works, studied through evidence and probabilistic generalisations). The last section sets out the book's plan: a "micro to macro" route from individuals to groups, institutions, states and international relations.

Chapter 2: Political Behavior Is Human Behavior

Starting from tensions in the South China Sea, the chapter argues that even the largest conflicts rest on individual decisions. It first surveys normative answers to questions about rights, social justice and who should rule (utilitarian, libertarian, Marxist and Rawlsian views, plus non-Western, feminist and Black philosophical challenges). It then turns to behaviour: fast and slow thinking, strategic versus expressive action, self-interest versus public-spirited motives, the partial predictability of behaviour, and the ultimatum game as an example of how context shapes choices.

Chapter 3: Political Ideology

Using Venezuela's economic and political crisis as its opening case, this long chapter traces Western ideologies from Greek ideas of virtuous rule and mixed government through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Adam Smith, classical liberalism and Mill, to the debate between interventionist liberals and Hayek. It covers nationalism, Marxism, fascism and authoritarianism, then maps contemporary democratic liberalism (centre left and centre right), a "New Left" (environmentalism, feminism, critical race and gender theory, democratic socialism, Indigenist federalism) and a "New Right" associated with conservative populism. It closes with positions that reject ideology itself: scientific socialism, Burkean conservatism and religious extremism.

Chapter 4: Civil Liberties

The chapter opens with COVID-19 mask mandates to show how individual freedom and community responsibility collide. It explains constitutions written in terms of negative or positive rights, individualist versus communitarian systems, constitutionalism (rule of law, limited government, guaranteed rights) and procedural versus substantive due process. Later sections compare countries on privacy, self-determination, expression and religion, freedom of movement, the rights of the accused and the emerging right to a healthy environment.

Chapter 5: Political Participation and Public Opinion

Beginning with the killing of Trayvon Martin and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the chapter defines political participation and self-government and treats voting as the central form of participation. It examines what limits turnout in the United States (age, income, race, gender, registration rules, voter ID, gerrymandering, voter fatigue), then other forms of participation and the idea of social capital. The second half explains what public opinion is, where it comes from, how polls measure it and why it matters to governments.

Chapter 6: The Fundamentals of Group Political Activity

This chapter moves from individuals to groups. It covers political socialisation (family, friends, schools, places of worship, social media) and political culture, distinguishing elite, mass and minority cultures. It then introduces collective dilemmas and collective action problems, including the tragedy of the commons, free riding and the prisoner's dilemma, and discusses remedies such as authority, privatisation, monitoring and sanctions, and social solidarity. Greta Thunberg's climate activism frames the discussion.

Chapter 7: Civil Rights

The chapter defines civil rights as guarantees of equal protection regardless of group membership and links them to constitutionalism and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It explains how political culture and majority–minority power shape whether rights are protected, surveys abuses against LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people of colour, women and religious and ethnic minorities, and compares movements from the US civil rights movement and the Velvet Revolution to the Arab Spring, Me Too and Black Lives Matter. A final section looks at how legislatures, courts and executives bring about change.

Chapter 8: Interest Groups, Political Parties, and Elections

Opening with EMILY's List, the chapter classifies interest groups (economic and non-economic), compares pluralism, disturbance theory and transaction theory, and weighs the benefits of groups against factionalism and economic bias; inside and outside lobbying are explained. It then turns to political parties, party systems and the claim that parties are weakening in an era of candidate-centred campaigns, before covering elections, districting, the Electoral College, plurality and majority rules, and referendums and initiatives.

Chapter 9: Legislatures

The chapter sets out the three main jobs of legislatures—making laws, representing constituents and overseeing government—and compares parliamentary and presidential systems by how power flows from voters to the executive. It weighs unicameral efficiency against bicameral representation of different viewpoints, and ends with threats to legislative power: executive dominance, legislative deference and polarisation.

Chapter 10: Executives, Cabinets, and Bureaucracies

Here the book classifies democracies as presidential, parliamentary or semi-presidential and distinguishes head of state from head of government. It describes formal and informal presidential powers (including the "bully pulpit" and the link to populism), how prime ministers are chosen and removed, the advantages and drawbacks of each regime type, and how cabinets function. The final section covers the growth and characteristics of bureaucracies and merit-based civil service systems.

Chapter 11: Courts and Law

Starting from the trial that followed George Floyd's death, the chapter contrasts rule-of-law and rule-by-law judiciaries and four broad methods of judicial selection. It explains how courts act only on the issues brought before them and depend on other branches to implement judgments, compares civil, common, customary, religious and mixed legal systems, separates criminal from civil law, and discusses due process, impartiality and the different forms of judicial review.

Chapter 12: The Media

Using the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon television debate as a hook, the chapter presents the media as a watchdog or "fourth estate" and as a channel between government and citizens. It traces print, radio, television and the internet, discusses ownership concentration and state-sponsored broadcasters, examines horse-race election coverage, and considers social media, algorithms, misinformation and declining trust linked to polarisation.

Chapter 13: Governing Regimes

The chapter defines government in terms of power and authority over a territory and uses Weber's traditional, charismatic and rational-legal sources of legitimacy, together with propaganda, civil disobedience and revolution. It categorises contemporary regimes, separating hard and soft authoritarianism (North Korea and Morocco are examples) from representative forms, and ends with the spread of illiberal representative regimes, citing Hungary and India.

Chapter 14: International Relations

This chapter introduces the international system: military, economic and political power (including soft power), the types of actors, sovereignty and anarchy, and levels of analysis (individual, state, global) for explaining conflict. It then sets out three families of worldview: realism with its focus on security and the balance of power; liberalism and constructivism; and critical approaches such as feminism and Marxism.

Chapter 15: International Law and International Organizations

Taking overfishing as a shared-resource problem, the chapter explains why global governance is needed under anarchy and what international law, built from treaties, can and cannot do. It describes the United Nations and other global intergovernmental organisations, regional bodies such as the European Union, NATO and the African Union, and non-state actors from NGOs to corporations, religious and ethnic movements, terrorist groups and organised crime.

Chapter 16: International Political Economy

The final chapter, opening with the COP26 climate conference, traces international political economy from mercantilism through Adam Smith and liberal trade to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF, World Bank, GATT and later the WTO). It covers the post–Cold War shift towards development and modernisation theory, current issues (globalisation and trade, financial crises, exchange-rate regimes) and debates over whether poverty, inequality and environmental crisis are built into capitalism.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1: What Is Politics and What Is Political Science?

• Rules, reality and choices: the book's three-part lens for explaining any political event—the formal and informal rules, the surrounding circumstances, and what actors decide.
• Normative versus empirical political science: the difference between asking what politics ought to be, using reason and logic, and asking how it actually works, using evidence.
• Legitimate authority: power to enforce rules that is exercised in ways consistent with those rules.

Chapter 2: Political Behavior Is Human Behavior

• Fast and slow thinking: most political choices rely on quick, near-automatic judgements rather than effortful deliberation.
• Strategic versus expressive action: acting to achieve an outcome versus acting to show who one is, often combined in the same act, such as voting.
• Ultimatum game: a simple bargaining game used to show that context, not narrow self-interest alone, shapes how people divide resources.

Chapter 3: Political Ideology

• Political ideology: a consciously held set of ideas about how political life is and should be structured.
• Social contract: the idea, developed differently by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, that government should be judged by what people in a state of nature would agree to.
• New Left and New Right: contemporary movements that challenge the centre left and centre right from further along the spectrum.

Chapter 4: Civil Liberties

• Negative and positive rights: limits on what government may do versus obligations that government must fulfil.
• Constitutionalism: rule of law, limited government and guaranteed individual rights taken together.
• Procedural and substantive due process: fair procedures for dealing with individuals versus protection of the rights those procedures serve.

Chapter 5: Political Participation and Public Opinion

• Political participation: action expressing an individual's political will, from voting to protest and online engagement.
• Institutional barriers to turnout: registration rules, ID laws, gerrymandering and voter fatigue that shape who votes.
• Public opinion: the aggregation of individual views on an issue, measured through polling.

Chapter 6: The Fundamentals of Group Political Activity

• Political socialisation: the gradual process by which people acquire political values from their surroundings.
• Collective action problem: a situation in which everyone would gain from cooperating but each has an incentive not to.
• Tragedy of the commons and free riding: two classic forms of the problem, addressed by authority, privatisation, monitoring and sanctions, or solidarity.

Chapter 7: Civil Rights

• Civil rights: government guarantees of equal protection regardless of group characteristics such as race, sex or ability.
• Majority–minority relations: majorities' power to protect or discriminate against minorities, shaped by political culture.
• Civil rights movements: mass action—protest, boycotts, civil disobedience, elections—through which less powerful groups win change.

Chapter 8: Interest Groups, Political Parties, and Elections

• Pluralism, disturbance theory and transaction theory: competing explanations for why interest groups form and whom government listens to.
• Inside and outside lobbying: working through direct relationships with officials versus mobilising public support.
• Candidate-centred campaigns: elections in which candidates depend less on parties, cited as evidence of party weakening.

Chapter 9: Legislatures

• Core legislative functions: lawmaking, representation and oversight.
• Parliamentary versus presidential systems: whether executive power flows through the legislature or directly from voters.
• Executive dominance and legislative deference: external and internal threats to legislative power.

Chapter 10: Executives, Cabinets, and Bureaucracies

• Head of state versus head of government: ceremonial and political roles that are combined in presidential regimes and separated in parliamentary and semi-presidential ones.
• Formal and informal powers: constitutional or statutory powers versus those that come from custom, such as the power to persuade.
• Bureaucracy: hierarchical, specialised, rule-bound and professional administration, typically staffed through merit-based civil service.

Chapter 11: Courts and Law

• Rule of law versus rule by law: courts that hold everyone accountable versus courts used to entrench those in power.
• Legal system families: civil, common, customary, religious and mixed systems.
• Judicial review: checking whether laws and actions conform to the constitution, done by courts in some countries and by other bodies in others.

Chapter 12: The Media

• Fourth estate (watchdog): the media's role in checking government and informing citizens.
• Ownership concentration: control of most outlets by a few firms, with effects on content.
• Polarisation and trust: falling trust in media feeds polarisation, which in turn lowers trust.

Chapter 13: Governing Regimes

• Weberian legitimacy: traditional, charismatic and rational-legal grounds for seeing rule as rightful.
• Hard and soft authoritarianism: unaccountable regimes that differ in how far they consult the people and respect their interests.
• Illiberal representative regime: an elected government that rejects liberal rights norms.

Chapter 14: International Relations

• Anarchy: the absence of an overarching authority above sovereign states.
• Levels of analysis: explaining conflict through individual, state and system-level factors.
• Realism, liberalism/constructivism and critical theories: the three worldviews the chapter compares.

Chapter 15: International Law and International Organizations

• Global governance: rules and forums for managing shared problems among sovereign states.
• Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs): bodies such as the UN, EU, NATO and African Union through which states cooperate, often shaped by the most powerful members.
• Non-state actors: NGOs and other actors, legitimate or not, that act across borders.

Chapter 16: International Political Economy

• Mercantilism: the view that wealth is finite and should be protected by state policy.
• Bretton Woods institutions: the IMF, the World Bank and GATT (later the WTO), which structured the post-war economy.
• Modernisation theory: a post–Cold War framework for promoting development in poorer countries.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear organising logic. The preface and Section 1.6 explain that the book moves from individuals to groups, institutions and international relations, and the five units follow that plan. Concepts introduced early (rules, reality and choices; strategic versus expressive behaviour) return in later chapters, and Chapter 6 explicitly builds on Chapter 2.
• Integration of subfields. Instead of separate blocks on theory, comparative politics and international relations, normative questions sit beside empirical ones (Chapter 2 pairs Rawls and Marx with behavioural research), and comparative material on legislatures, executives and courts is set against regime types and international relations.
• Wide range of examples and perspectives. Cases run from Venezuela, Myanmar and the South China Sea to Hungary, India and COP26, and the ideology chapter covers feminism, Indigenism, conservative populism and critical race and gender theory alongside the classic Western canon.
• Student-facing features. Each section opens with learning outcomes; recurring boxes such as "What Can I Do?" (skills like communication and data analysis), "Where Can I Engage?", "Show Me the Data" and "Meet a Professional" connect content to civic life and careers. Each chapter ends with section-by-section summaries, key terms, multiple-choice review questions and suggested readings.

Limitations

• A US tilt in places. Although the preface stresses a global approach, some sections are explicitly American: Section 5.2 is about limits on voting in the United States, and Section 8.6 describes US districting, the Electoral College and ballot initiatives. Readers outside the US will need to translate these to their own systems.
• Breadth over depth. Chapter 3 covers more than two thousand years of ideology in eight sections, and Chapters 14–16 compress international relations and political economy into introductory surveys; theorists and debates are sketched rather than examined.
• Limited methods training. Chapter 1 introduces the scientific method, facts and generalisations, but the book has no dedicated chapter on research design, measurement or causal inference beyond the polling material in Chapter 5.
• Recall-oriented assessment and time-bound examples. End-of-chapter review questions are multiple choice and mostly test definitions, and no answer key appears in the student PDF. Many examples are anchored in 2020–2021 (COVID-19 mandates, the 2020 US election, COP26), so some will date.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this Introduction to Politics list, the OpenStax text sits alongside Heywood and Laing's Politics and Garner, Ferdinand and Lawson's Introduction to Politics, all textbooks for a first course. Its strength is accessibility: it assumes no prior coursework and builds concepts in small steps, so it works as a first text or as a free companion for students who find a denser textbook hard going. Students who want a longer treatment of ideologies, states and global politics can move on to Heywood or to Garner and colleagues, which are listed for the same course and are generally described as fuller surveys.

The two other titles serve a different purpose. Lowndes, Marsh and Stoker's Theory and Methods in Political Science addresses the approaches and research methods that this book only touches on in Chapter 1, and The Oxford Handbook of Political Science is a research-level reference. Both are best read after an introductory text such as this one, once students know the basic vocabulary of institutions, regimes and international relations.

How to Use This Book

The book is written for first-year undergraduates and for students who may not major in political science; no prior study of politics is needed. A one-semester course can follow the units in order. Chapter 1 is essential because it supplies the framework and vocabulary used throughout. Chapters 2, 6, 9, 10, 13 and 14 form a solid core for a general course; Chapters 3 and 4 suit courses with a political theory emphasis; Chapters 7, 8, 11 and 12 add depth on rights, parties, courts and media; and Chapters 15 and 16 are useful for courses that lean towards international relations.

Read each section's learning outcomes first and check them against the section-by-section summaries at the end of the chapter. Use the review questions for quick self-testing, then go further with the "Show Me the Data" boxes, which ask you to interpret real charts, and the suggested readings. Because the book is published on the web as well as in PDF, the online version also contains embedded videos and links referred to in the text.

Edition and Sources

This guide is based on the 2022 OpenStax edition of Introduction to Political Science (no edition number is given), read in the official free web PDF linked from https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science (the copyright page of the downloaded file carries a 2026 Rice University notice, reflecting later errata updates). The guide draws on the preface, the full table of contents, and for all 16 chapters the introductions, every section heading, the section-by-section summaries, key-terms lists and sample review questions and suggested readings, with Section 1.6 (the book's roadmap) and the ultimatum-game material in Section 2.4 read in full.