政治学学科侧重于权力和治理问题，尤其是正式和非正式的政治机构。它还侧重于政治行为，政治进程，政治经济以及国家与社会的关系。该领域包括四个实质性子领域：美国政治（涵盖国家和地方政治，选举和宪法），比较政治（旨在研究其他国家的政治体系，包括研究各个州和参与），以比较政治为主题。跨国比较，国际关系，涉及国家和其他政治行为者在国际舞台上的行为方式，包括安全，外交政策，国际组织和国际经济关系等主题，以及分析历史的政治理论规范政治思想以及分析性概念，例如正义或自由的性质。
The discipline of political science focuses on issues of power and governance and, in particular, on political institutions, both formal and informal. It also focuses on political behavior, political processes, political economy, and state-society relations.<br><br>The field consists of four substantive subfields: American politics, which covers such topics as national and local politics, elections, and constitutional law, comparative politics, which aims at understanding the political systems of other countries, both by studying individual states and by engaging in cross-national comparisons, international relations, which deals with the ways that states and other political actors behave in the international arena, including such topics as security, foreign policies, international organizations, and international economic relations, and political theory, which analyzes the history of normative political thought as well as of analytic concepts such as the nature of justice or liberty.<br><br>Other broad topics, such as political economy, or the study of the relationships between economic and political processes, overlap with the subfields, but also constitute a separate program (see below). Methodology, including statistical analysis and formal modeling, also occupies an important place in the discipline.