In political science, there is broad agreement that the political system belongs to the “core area” of politics and is a fundamental term for political science analysis and theory building.

Political system and political science

Political science seems to have become so common a general term in both scientific terminology and everyday language that it seems to be self-explanatory. Therefore, representations and analyzes of national political sciences often refrain from precisely defining or describing what they mean by this term. In addition to the rather vague usage of the term, political science can distinguish between two approaches to define political science more closely.

An approach that can be described as historical-pragmatic attempts to define the term more precisely as it distinguishes it from other traditional political science terms. The other approach seeks to define the term in more detail in the context of different system-theoretical assumptions and approaches. If you have some issues with your computer to better understand political science, https://whatt.org/ can be helpful.

From a historical and pragmatic point of view

The term has been used increasingly since the 1950s to replace other key terms of the classic comparative government doctrine that were perceived as too formalistic or legalistic. This was particularly true of the concept of the state. In its comparative studies, developing country research had come across political structures that could by no means be called a state in the modern sense. Yet there was such a thing as a special political area about which this society did their political business. Against this background, the term political science was developed, which assumes that at least in principle “all societies are confronted with similar political problems”. The term political system is not only suitable for making comparisons with pre-modern societies, but also for capturing political realities of the “post-state era“, in which the state is no longer the only permanently organized political structure of society. The concept of political science now also proves to be able to better combine the traditional state-political area and the newly created political-social area.

In political science, there are a number of terms of the political system. Now every attempt to define political science is a theoretical construct. Correspondingly, there are many different models with a large number of attempts at definition within political science.