I am 16 , clueless about politics and recently got interested i want to go in depth and understand it all but i do not know how . I do not know what topic should i research first what i should know first .

Anyone here who would help concidering i have 0 knowledge on politics

I often see on the internet left wing and right wing politics, socialism, communism and libertarianism. I want to understand these concepts.

Can somebody recommend an easy to understand book which explains these concepts.

Hey guys! I’ve recently gotten interested in geopolitics but honestly don’t know much about countries and their affairs yet. Whenever I read articles or follow discussions, I get confused because I lack the background/context.

How should I start learning? Should I make notes? If yes, what structure should I follow, especially for important countries that frequently appear in the news?

Would love to hear your suggestions, resources, ideas, or tips on how you started! :)

Hello!
I learned a lot about the revolutionary war over the summer.

I was watching a revolutionary war YouTube video and the host mentioned this book, and said something to the effect of “yes the author is a conservative, but if you read it with a grain of salt, it does offer a lengthy overview of the RW”

when I say “YouTube video” I don’t mean some random slop video, I remember it was someone with an academic background. Either Heather Cox Richardson, or Ken Burns.

The video title I don’t remember, but I remember being persuaded enough to order the book from my schools library, and was put on the wait list.

When I got a notification that my hold was ready, I was confused because I had totally forgotten about requesting it. I saw a review from Andrew Klavan (conservative pundit) on the back, and went to search the book to see if it was biased…. I found very little talking about the book. The Google AI overview said it was biased, but that was based on 2 small sources, and I don’t trust such a simple overview.

TLDR, I just want to know if this book is worth reading. Is it just christian nationalist propaganda, or is there some valuable historical knowledge?

Edit: a word

Edit 2:
The whole reason I made this post is because I am suspicious about which YouTube channel that referenced it, but I can’t go back and watch the video for context, bc I don’t remember.

I know for sure, the video wasn’t outright praising the book. it got mentioned for some reason, and the host said that it was very “dense” with information, or something, but he definitely said the author has bias, I know that.

So yes, I know it’s obviously biased, you guys, it literally says “The birth of the greatest nation in the world”— I’m not naive, I understand the racist homage to “Birth of a Nation”.

As I said, I ordered this book 12 weeks ago. I forgot about it until I picked it up, and was aghast at the ridiculous cover.

Thank you for your input I really appreciate the helpful responses!

Suggest me some political theory books to begin with, in order to be more active in class with good intellect value, and least personal biases. Note: I am a beginner, 2nd year pol science hons student, and the fact I get a bit bored of books🥀BUT THIS TIME I AM PROFOUNDLY DETERMINED TO READ GOOD BOOKS

A few weeks ago I shared POLARIS here: an interactive graph of who in U.S. politics is allied with whom and who is feuding with whom, with a nightly pipeline that reads the political press and tracks how those ties shift. Two comments shaped what I built next:

1. Could this show who actually influences federal decisions — staffers, donors, lobbying, roll-call votes?
2. How far can you trust a graph built from biased, clickbait headlines?

Here's what changed, including what didn't work.

Youtube : https://youtu.be/g1Iy-Z6y_lo

Live: https://world-politicians.vercel.app/ (no signup, works on mobile)

Source (MIT): https://github.com/showjihyun/world-politicians

---

What it is

- 101 figures, 266 hand-curated relationships (alliance, feud, bipartisan bridge, political family, mentorship), in 2D or 3D

- A nightly news layer. Articles from 17 outlets are classified by an LLM as ally-leaning, feud-leaning or neutral, and kept in a rolling one-year archive

- A relationship timeline. Pick any two people for month-by-month polarity. Trump × Musk shows the June 2025 blow-up and the January 2026 reconciliation

- An evidence panel on every edge, with direct article links or a plain "no linked source"

1. Measured data, kept separate from editorial judgment

Co-sponsorship (119th Congress). I added 112 edges from GovInfo's bill-status bulk data, for pairs with 10 or more shared bills. They're drawn differently from the curated edges, because "these two are allies" is a judgment and "they

co-sponsored 78 bills" is a measurement.

- Raw counts mostly re-encode party. 84% of pairs above the threshold are same-party. The 11 cross-caucus pairs are the interesting part: Fitzpatrick × Gluesenkamp Perez (19 bills), Collins × Klobuchar (15), Lawler × Torres (12).

- Cross-party is judged by caucus, not party label. Counting Sanders and King as cross-party inflated the count from 11 to 19.

- Direction is kept. "Kim signs 15 of Warren's bills, Warren signs none of Kim's" is not the same relationship as "Padilla and Sanders, 15 each".

FEC money (2026 cycle), shown on the profile. One FEC file mixes three things that have to be separated:

- direct contributions: $32.0M

- independent expenditures supporting a candidate: $14.4M

- independent expenditures opposing a candidate: $18.1M

Merge them and the $10.1M spent attacking Thomas Massie reads as his funding. On-screen caveat: named PAC money is only about 6% of receipts.

Lobbying revolving door. From the House Clerk's raw LD-1 filings (2022–2026): 295 former staffers of 61 figures are now registered lobbyists. Matching uses full names only, since Congress has had 33 members named Harris.

Party-line defection. From Voteview: the share of party-divided votes (1,279 in the 119th) on which a member broke with their own party's majority. Raw agreement scores just encode party (Cruz × Hawley at 98.6% means "both Republican"); defection holds party constant.

1. The negative result

I tried six ways to turn these person-level facts into relationship signals:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Test │ Result │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Shared donors × curated ally/feud │ 27% vs 28% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Shared donors × heavy co-sponsorship │ 19% vs 17% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ PAC share × bipartisan edges │ 10.3% vs 8.3% │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ NOMINATE deviation × intra-party feud │ p = 0.81 │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Party defection × intra-party feud │ p = 0.99 │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Party defection × outside money spent against them │ p = 0.058, no dose-response, confounded by race competitiveness │

└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Collins and Fitzpatrick are among the most frequent defectors, and neither has a single intra-party feud. Quiet, steady defection doesn't produce public fights. The feuds in this graph are loud and personal, and they look orthogonal to the voting dimension. So money, lobbying and defection are shown as facts about a person, each with a note on what the number does not mean.

1. Handling media bias

That critique was fair, and a better prompt can't fix it on its own. Following the literature (D'Alessio & Allen's meta-analysis, Groseclose & Milyo, Gentzkow & Shapiro, Soroka on negativity bias, Vallone et al. on the hostile media effect), I split the problem into three layers:

┌─────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Layer │ What it looked like here (when studied) │ What I did │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Gatekeeping (what becomes news) │ Feuds were 2/3 of ally/feud headlines │ Changed how votes are counted │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Visibility (who gets covered) │ Trump appeared in 71% of signals │ Shown on screen, not "corrected" — it's a collection problem │

├─────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ Tone (how it's told) │ The LLM's polarity call │ Scored against labels; tested for outlet cues │

└─────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What changed:

- One vote per pair per day, not per article. Five outlets running one story used to cast five votes. A day now casts one vote, weighted 1 + ln(outlets), and only if two-thirds of that day's coverage agrees. Decisive votes fell from 244 to 175. I tried clustering stories by headline similarity first and dropped it, because it fails both ways: two headlines about the same Walz story scored a Jaccard of only 0.10.

- A month needs a 2:1 margin to flip. Previously the month's first non-neutral headline set its colour, so one feud headline could beat six later ally headlines. Real reversals (Trump × Musk) get covered by many outlets over many days and clear the bar; a single clickbait headline doesn't. Jeffries × Trump in August 2026 had 5 feud signals to 2 ally and had been showing "ally".

- Disagreement is shown, not resolved. When Fox frames Graham × Trump as an alliance and CBS frames it as a feud, the month is hatched rather than one side being picked. Given the hostile media effect, that seemed more honest than adjudicating.

- The source mix is public. The top five outlets carry 63% of the archive, and AP and Reuters together are under 5%.

Tested and dropped: I swapped "Fox News" and "NPR" on the same headlines, with the outlet suffix stripped so it couldn't leak. 0 of 14 polarity calls changed, while plain re-runs of identical input wobbled by up to 13%. So I dropped the planned "outlet-blind" second pass, which would have doubled the cost.

Not done yet, on purpose:

- Wire-service baseline calibration (in the spirit of Groseclose & Milyo). The wires supply only about a dozen articles so far.

- Discounting feud headlines by their measured false-positive rate (neutral → feud is about 30%). Most of the labels are model-seeded, so this would be the model grading itself.

- Signed-triad balance checks. 37 of the 39 triangles the news produces pass through Trump.

How accurate is the classifier? On 118 stratified articles it gets 84.7% on polarity and 87.3% on picking the right pair. Most errors are a neutral article read as a feud; only one was a true ally/feud reversal. Caveat: only 20 of those labels are human-checked so far, so treat this as a floor to beat, not a validated score.

1. Still open

- Staffer movement between offices

- Individual donors (a huge separate file, where only gifts over $200 are itemised)

- Senate-side lobbying data, which currently blocks automated access

---

Feedback I'd most value:

- Edges you think are wrong (with a source)

- Better ways to validate polarity than headline classification

- Is there a relationship-level measure from voting or co-sponsorship that isn't just party in disguise?

I'd also welcome help hand-labelling the evaluation set. Methodology notes are in the repo under docs/roadmap.md and docs/research/.

what books do you think are essential for political science students? can be either classics or contemporary ones. I'm looking to get a better grasp of this field and I feel like I'm lacking a lot of basic knowledge.

Paper published in PNAS on September 28, 2026. Berkeley News coverage here.

Hi y'all! I'm a junior year college student who recently switched from a major in business management to political science. I have soft skills in the way of the major; I am very good at writing, understanding systems, have a tremendous amount of curiosity about the world. I have no doubts I will be able to do well in my classes and learn a lot.

However, a lot of my classmates have a great deal of knowledge that stems from just generally having been in their major longer and more dedication to world events, international relations, et cetera. I would say I'm an average amount of informed on current events, and have a slightly-above layman's understanding of the international system. Many of them seem to have a tremendous encyclopedia of historical or recently current events on hand to draw from when discussing current points, and I wonder how they found all of this information.

I want to become much more invested, even without my classes' help, in these topics. What would you all suggest are some good starting points for becoming as informed as possible?

Sorry if this post is unclear at all or sounds weird. I can clarify if need be.

Hi! My son's girlfriend is a political science major and I'd like to learn more about this subject so I can talk to her about her interests. Any books or particular topics to start on?

So I’m planning on applying to a masters in political science concentrating on Foreign Policy and International Politics next year. Now, I know a lot about IR and International politics, but the written exam necessary to be accepted into the program is solely based on pure Political Science and in a bibliography they choose every year. So studying based on the bibliography from this year’s admission exam is basically worthless. I come from a Law background and even though I have some “instinctual” knowledge of political science, mostly from having had classes on it in HS and SOME contact with it at the very start of law school, I don’t feel like I have a robust understanding of it and I’m afraid I won’t be able to fully grasp the concepts in the bibliography of this program when the time comes, specially because most of the books are not classicals that you can just read and then research online to have a better understanding of it. It’s mostly niche books about niche topics on political science which I feel like you have to have a good grasp on the history and the basic, classical concepts and debates surrounding it to fully understand.

So to you guys who actually have a formal education of PoliSci: what would be a basic reading list for me to have a decent, good enough for a masters admission, understanding of political science with a general and comprehensive understanding of the field? It doesn’t need to be a short list, I have time to read.

I already have Weber, Foucault, Hegel and Durkheim on my list (although idk which of their work is the most important to start with), but I would like to go way deeper than that. Also I don’t know almost anything about marxism. I have read Engels but that was basically to understand The Second Sex, so my contact with marxism is limited solely to its contribution to feminism. I know nothing about all the different marxist approaches you can have to political science and the major theories that build on and criticize orthodox marxism. I only know how it is interpreted in IR.

22M here with a deep passion and interest in politics. I wanna eventually get a MA in polisci just for personal enrichment purposes but im already in school for something else already. I’m taking an autodidact approach to my study of politics and it’s become a hobby at this point all I do is consume politics lol. The areas im interested in political science are American politics, American political history, American political thought, political theory/philosophy, and judical politics (like the courts, supreme courts, constitutionalism, constitutional law, interpretation battles like originalism vs living constitution). Any suggestions for reading materials or content overall I can consume to educate myself? Like textbooks, secondary books, journals (love academic/scholarly journals that lean to the qualitative side), online lectures etc. anything that would aid in self education in politics.

Ima avid reader of NYT opinion section so that should give you an idea of where my head is in terms of the political content I like to consume. Please refrain from giving me anything that’s empirical or quantitative that’s not really my cup of tea.

Looking forward to your guys suggestions and thank you!

The article is making the rounds on X (Twitter) and stirred up discussion focused on the finding that underrepresented minorities and women have an advantage in the political science job market.

Abstract:
Several studies have found that only graduates of top-ranked PhD programs have a reasonable chance of landing a tenure-track professorship. However, these findings are based on an examination of the backgrounds of current faculty at PhD-granting institutions, which leaves findings vulnerable to several types of bias. I address these limitations by analyzing the placements of political science PhD candidates during the 2023–2024 academic job-market cycle. In my analysis, departmental rank had virtually no impact on whether candidates found tenure-track assistant professorships, but it did predict the types of positions that candidates found. Other factors had stronger associations with placement outcomes. In particular, publishing solo-authored and coauthored articles, having underrepresented minority or female identity, and studying American politics were all associated with significantly higher placement rates.

Come on now. Did we need this to tell us that if Ticketmaster screwed you over you'd be upset at the ticketing policies?

For my class I need to write about why Andrew Jackson is a “near great” president. I don’t really agree with this point and neither does any article I’ve read so far. Any scholarly article about his achievements or legacy would help so much 🙏🙏🙏🙏

Hello, i have a midterm on October 14th and was wondering if anyone has used the Chat GPT study module to help for tests, if so is it accurate information if i upload my classes text slides?

I know the rules say no homework help, but I'm actually asking for someone to give me the homework. I've been stuck job searching for months as a recent graduate and I feel like I need to exercise my brain. Does anyone have any research or writing prompts I can work on? I've been searching for exercises to do but I'm comping up empty. Cheers.

Hej,

Is there any good YouTube channels with content about political science?

Preferably without ideological bias.

I am especially interested in how a specialized military economy can transitioned into civilian goods like green energy, food , water and the others?

anyone know good podcasts/channels/books any media on geopolitics that doesn’t have a western-based mindset, i want to read something not biased and objective

I built a tool that lets people vote on real congressional bills and compare how their own House rep and Senators voted. What surprised me from early usage was most people are less aligned with their representatives than they assume - including people who voted for them.

That raises a question: if voters had easy access to their rep's actual voting record, would it change how they vote? Or is party identity strong enough that voting records barely factors in? Curious what this sub thinks.

The tool is yeaornay.org if you want to compare.

Hi everyone!

I'm currently in my final semester before I graduate with my bachelors. I really enjoy political science but I have struggled the past few semesters every time I have to do a big research project, especially in classes like statistical analysis and fieldwork and qualitative methods.

For my capstone project I decided to study the reasons behind low voter turnout in the state I live in. However, I think I overthought and instead of submitting what I had I ran it through an LLM to make sure I wasn't missing anything. It highlighted sections I was "missing" and I added them because I thought that was what my project should look like. I'm not a cheater, I have never used AI to do my work, and I genuinely enjoy using my brain. I think the stress got to me though so instead of just submitting what I had originally I added a whole bunch of unnecessary information that wasn't relevant because I thought my work was not good enough or what I assumed a good research outline should look like. It wasn't though and I got the following feedback from my professor:

"That said, the outline you submitted was clearly AI generated, at least in large part. There is no way you can do all of the things you say you will do in a single semester. Do you plan to go to all of the different islands to do interviews? That's unlikely. Also, I already told you you didn't need human subjects approval, yet in the methods section, the generative AI default for qualitative methods (interviews, etc) is always human subjects committee approval, and it's included here. Also, election day is a federal holiday, so we already have it off. Would making it a state holiday as well make a huge difference? You'd have to figure out who it would impact in terms of industries or sectors of the economy to explain the difference between who has off for a federal holiday and state holiday. Your best bet here is to revise your outline WAY down and only focus on maybe civic engagement due to distance from national politics and then find three subpoints within that. Then pick one island, or even one geographic region of a single island, or one demographic category - like all military for example, and only interview those people. If you wanted to do a survey, you could broaden your research focus a bit, but otherwise, this is way too ambitious and you're unlikely to be able to finish not only the research, but the writing as well. The goal here is to have a good senior project paper so that you can graduate, not an incomplete research project"

I guess what I'm looking for is guidance on how to do an effective 25 page research paper for my capstone project when I literally feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Also please don't suggest talking to my prof. I have done that numerous times. I'm looking for a different perspective, especially from people that are still in undergrad as well. I'm in an online program so I don't spend time with my peers in the program unfortunately. I feel like I'm over-complicating things which is causing me to doubt my own work.

Thanks in advance for any advice you have! :)

Hello! I want to attend a sociology faculty one day because I'm so passionate about the social movements. However, I have a question: what could I study in relation to a protest? Is it methodologically correct to conduct a study using interviews and observation? Thank you so much and I'm looking forward to find new things!!!