100 Fun Facts About Political Science

Who is the only US president to hold a PhD?

Woodrow Wilson: a political scientist by training, in 1913 he revived delivering the annual message to Congress in person, a practice Jefferson had dropped.

Which 1950s–60s movement pushed political science toward the scientific study of behavior?

Robert Dahl and Philip Converse were among its leading figures; it favored surveys and empirical testing over legal texts.

In 1948, which newspaper's early edition wrongly announced 'Dewey Defeats Truman'?

Chicago Daily Tribune: polls had predicted a Dewey win, and a printers' strike forced the paper to go to press hours early, before most results were in.

Game theorists devised their most famous dilemma in 1950 while working at which Cold War think tank?

RAND Corporation: the tale of two suspects each offered a deal came later, from Albert Tucker, who wanted to make the game clear to an audience of psychologists.

Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 trip that produced Democracy in America was officially meant to study what?

Prisons: he and Gustave de Beaumont did publish a prison report in 1833, but his letters admit the mission was largely a pretext for studying American society.

When ancient Athenians voted to banish a citizen for ten years, they wrote his name on what?

Pottery shards: Plutarch tells of an illiterate voter who asked Aristides himself to write 'Aristides' on his, being tired of hearing him called 'the Just'.

The word 'boycott' comes from Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned by his community in which country?

Ireland: when tenants, shops and even his own workers shunned him, he had to bring in workers from Ulster, guarded by soldiers, to harvest his crops.

The International Political Science Association (1949) grew out of an initiative by which body?

UNESCO: its charter set out to build peace through education and science, and in 1948 it made the study of tensions between nations a social science priority.

Which Greek philosopher declared that "man is by nature a political animal"?

Aristotle: he went on to say that anyone unable to live in a community, or so self-sufficient as to need none, must be either a beast or a god.

In Plato's Republic, what is the name of the utopian city ruled by philosopher-kings?

Kallipolis: it would admit only hymns to the gods and praises of famous men, turning away even Homer, whom Socrates calls the greatest of poets.

Who argued in the Republic that justice is simply what benefits the stronger?

Thrasymachus: Socrates replies that rulers sometimes misjudge their own interest, so obeying them could end up harming the stronger after all.

Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to a member of which ruling family?

The Medici: after they returned to power he was jailed and tortured on suspicion of plotting against them, yet he still dedicated the book to one of them.

Machiavelli wrote that if a prince cannot be both, it is safer to be what?

Feared than loved: yet a prince must never be hated, so he should leave his subjects' property alone, since men forget a father's death sooner than a lost inheritance.

Which Renaissance figure does Machiavelli repeatedly cite approvingly in The Prince?

Cesare Borgia: he told Machiavelli he had planned for everything that might happen when his father the pope died, except being close to death himself.

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan while living in exile in which city?

Paris: while living there he also taught mathematics to the exiled young Prince of Wales, the future King Charles II.

Hobbes described life in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and" what?

Short: in that war of all against all, Hobbes wrote, there are no arts, no letters and no society, and worst of all, continual fear of violent death.

On the famous title page of Hobbes's Leviathan, the crowned giant's body is made up of what?

Tiny people: Hobbes pictured the state as an 'artificial man' whose strength comes from the many subjects who make it up.

Locke's First Treatise of Government is a line-by-line refutation of which author?

Robert Filmer: Locke was answering a man long dead, since Patriarcha, which traced kings' power back to Adam, was published only in 1680, decades after Filmer died.

Locke's Two Treatises was published anonymously shortly after which event?

The Glorious Revolution: the preface says the book will secure the throne of the new King William, though the text itself was likely drafted years earlier.

Rousseau's The Social Contract opens: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in' what?

Chains: yet Rousseau called the book only a surviving part of a far longer work on politics that he had begun years before and then abandoned.

According to Rousseau, only what has the right to legislate?

The general will: Rousseau added that whoever refuses to obey it will be compelled to by the whole body, which he said means only that he will be 'forced to be free'.

Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law famously championed which principle?

Separation of powers: James Madison called Montesquieu 'the oracle who is always consulted' on the subject when he defended the new US Constitution in Federalist No. 47.

Which Russian ruler drew on Montesquieu when writing the Nakaz, a guide for lawmakers?

Catherine the Great: her text upheld absolute rule, yet France still banned it as too liberal to publish.

Which Greek historian, a hostage in Rome, praised its balance of consuls, senate and assemblies?

Polybius: the hostage became a mentor and friend to the commander Scipio Aemilianus, and was with him to watch Carthage destroyed in 146 BCE.

Beside the legislative and executive, Locke named a third power of government, covering war, peace and alliances, called what?

Federative: Locke conceded it could hardly be split from the executive, because putting the public force under two commands would invite 'disorder and ruin'.

In which essay did Max Weber define the state by its monopoly on legitimate force?

Politics as a Vocation: Weber gave it as a lecture to Munich students during the 1919 revolution, and told them that not summer's bloom but 'a polar night of icy darkness' lay ahead, whoever won.

Robert Dahl argued that no country is a true democracy, so he called the closest real-world systems what?

Polyarchies: Dahl did not invent the word, which dates to the 1600s; he and Charles Lindblom revived it in 1953 because 'democracy' described an ideal, not any real government.

Who popularized the term "soft power"?

Joseph Nye: he coined it in a 1990 book rebutting the then-popular belief that America was in decline, arguing that tallies of military and economic might missed the power to attract.

Who wrote The End of History and the Last Man (1992)?

Francis Fukuyama: he later said the title was misread, since he meant an end to the contest of ideas, not of events, and he thought the European Union fit his vision better than America did.

Samuel Huntington's famous 1993 essay on conflict after the Cold War first appeared in which American magazine?

Foreign Affairs: not Foreign Policy, the rival magazine that Huntington himself had co-founded in 1970 to air other views on America's role abroad during the Vietnam War.

Samuel Huntington predicted post-Cold War conflict would stem mainly from differences between what?

Cultures: with the Cold War's contest of ideologies over, he reasoned, people would rally around history, language and above all religion, so 'the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future'.

Duverger's law links first-past-the-post voting with what outcome?

A two-party system: voters shy from small parties rather than waste their vote, so third parties wither.

A classic voting model predicts that two candidates competing for votes will both drift toward what?

The political center: the model adapts Harold Hotelling's 1929 account of why two rival shops on one street end up side by side in the middle.

Arrow's impossibility theorem generalizes a voting paradox named after which French marquis?

Marquis de Condorcet: he showed that majorities can prefer A to B, B to C and yet C to A. A backer of the French Revolution, he was arrested by its radicals and died in a prison cell in 1794.

Which Massachusetts governor's 1812 redistricting bill turned his name into a word for rigged maps?

Elbridge Gerry: by his son-in-law's account he found the partisan map 'highly disagreeable' but signed it anyway, and a Boston cartoon soon drew one district as a winged monster, the 'Gerry-mander'.

In redistricting, what is "packing"?

Concentrating rival voters in one district: the rivals win that seat by a landslide, but their surplus votes are wasted, which thins their support in every district around it.

Which Stoic senator of Rome, often credited with the first filibuster, talked until nightfall to block Julius Caesar?

Cato the Younger: when Caesar asked to run for consul without entering Rome, Cato spoke until dusk ended the session, and Caesar had to give up his triumph parade to stand in person.

In the US Senate, what motion, requiring a supermajority, ends a filibuster?

Cloture: the Senate had no such rule until 1917, and first used it in 1919 to cut off debate on the Treaty of Versailles, which it then voted down.

Which state's senate saw the longest filibuster in US history as of 2025, a 43-hour speech in 1977?

Texas: Bill Meier spoke for 43 hours, under rules that barred sitting or leaning, to fight a bill sealing workplace injury records. When he finally stopped, the Senate passed it anyway.

As of 2025, which country elects its whole parliament from party lists in one nationwide district, making every government a coalition?

Israel: all 120 Knesset seats are shared out by national vote share, and since no party has ever won a majority alone, small parties can often make or break a government.

Which body is known as the cradle of first-past-the-post voting?

British House of Commons: yet for centuries most of its members came from two-seat districts, and the single-winner contest only became the norm after the Third Reform Act of 1884-85.

Under first-past-the-post, a winner needs what share of the vote?

A plurality: simply more votes than anyone else, however few that is. In 2015 the UK seat of Belfast South was won on just 24.5 percent, so three in four voters had backed someone else.

Realism in international relations views the global system as lacking what?

A central authority: with no world government to call on when threatened, every state must see to its own defence, which is why realists expect rivalry and war to keep recurring.

Hans Morgenthau's classic Politics Among Nations argues that all states are locked in a struggle for what?

Power: 'international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power', he wrote. The German-Jewish émigré, who reached America in 1937, saw the urge to dominate as a fixed part of human nature.

Realists in world politics claim which ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War as an early forerunner?

Thucydides: in his Melian Dialogue, Athenian envoys tell a neutral island that 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must'. Athens then killed its men and enslaved everyone else.

Which 1795 essay by Kant takes its title from a Dutch innkeeper's sign that showed a graveyard?

Perpetual Peace: Kant borrowed the sign's grim joke, then wrote the essay in the form of a peace treaty, down to a 'secret article' telling states armed for war to consult philosophers.

What does the "dyadic" form of democratic peace theory claim?

Democracies don't fight each other: 'dyadic' means in pairs. The broader 'monadic' claim, that democracies are more peaceful toward everyone, has won far less support among researchers.

Unlike political philosophy, political science is primarily what in its approach?

Descriptive and explanatory: yet until the late 1800s the two were one subject, and only then did political science break away from philosophy as a field of its own.

French jurist Jean Bodin, a defender of strong monarchy, is best known for his 1576 theory of which concept?

Sovereignty: he called it a state's 'absolute and perpetual power', his cure for France's religious civil wars. He also wrote a witch-hunter's manual, and in 1587 the authorities searched his own home.

Who banned Machiavelli's The Prince in 1559, decades after its first printing?

Catholic Church: it put the book on its Index of forbidden titles, even though the first printing in 1532 had gone ahead with a pope's own permission.

What feature of France's 1789 National Assembly gave politics the terms 'left wing' and 'right wing'?

Where members sat showed their loyalties: supporters of the old regime gathered to the right of the assembly's president, and supporters of the revolution to his left.

Which European country let women vote in national elections only from 1971, after its male voters approved?

Switzerland needed its male voters to approve the change at the ballot box, and the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden kept women out of local votes until a court forced its hand in 1990.

The word 'candidate' comes from the Latin for which colour, the shade of toga worn by Roman office-seekers?

White, in Latin candidus, was the colour of the toga candida, rubbed with chalk until it dazzled, which men seeking office wore to speeches and debates.

Which American author coined the term 'banana republic' in a 1904 book inspired by his time in Honduras?

O. Henry invented the fictional Republic of Anchuria for Cabbages and Kings, a book he began in Honduras while on the run from an embezzlement charge at home.

In Britain's Parliament, the party 'whip' who keeps MPs in line for votes is named after a role in which pastime?

Hunting supplied the name: the 'whipper-in' was the huntsman's assistant who drove straying hounds back into the pack, much as a whip rounds up wavering colleagues.

Which is the only US state whose legislature has a single chamber rather than the usual two?

Nebraska merged its two chambers after a 1934 vote, won over by Senator George Norris's argument that two bodies doing the same job simply wasted money.

Which English novelist wrote of a coming 'cold war' in a 1945 essay about the atomic bomb?

George Orwell used the phrase in a London weekly two months after Hiroshima, picturing a world living under the lasting threat of nuclear weapons.

Which self-governing country became, in 1893, the first to let women vote in national elections?

New Zealand acted after a campaign led by Kate Sheppard, whose portrait later replaced the Queen's on the country's ten-dollar note.

Robert Putnam's 2000 book on America's fading community life is titled after people doing which activity alone?

Bowling made his point because more Americans were bowling than ever but fewer did so in organised teams, so fewer people met their neighbours over a game.

NATO's mutual-defence clause, Article 5, was invoked for the first time after which event?

The September 11 attacks led America's allies to treat the strike as one against them all, and NATO radar planes were sent to patrol the skies over the United States.

Which document did England's King John seal at Runnymede in 1215 under pressure from rebel barons?

Magna Carta failed at first: neither side kept its promises, the Pope annulled it and civil war followed, yet it became a lasting symbol of liberty.

Which international body, founded after World War I, did the United States never join despite helping to design it?

The League of Nations lost its strongest backer in 1920, when the US Senate failed to muster the two-thirds vote needed to approve membership.

Which English statesman coined the word 'utopia' in 1516 as the name of a fictional island society?

Thomas More built the name from Greek words meaning 'no place', a sly hint that his perfect society could not be found on any map.

Which former US First Lady chaired the UN committee that drafted the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt rallied rival political blocs behind the text, and it passed the General Assembly with 48 votes in favour and none against.

Which country has made voting in national elections compulsory since 1924, with fines for those who stay home?

Australia adopted the rule through a private bill from Senator Herbert Payne, who blamed low turnout on what he called voters' apathy and indolence.

Which country's parliament, the Althing, first met around 930 and is often called the oldest in the world?

Iceland's first assemblies met at Thingvellir, whose name means 'assembly fields', east of where Reykjavik later grew up.

President Eisenhower popularized the 'domino theory' in 1954 to warn of communism spreading across which region?

Southeast Asia was the worry: Eisenhower told reporters that if Indochina fell, its neighbours would topple in turn like a row of dominoes.

Which institution did historian Thomas Carlyle call a 'Fourth Estate', outweighing the three that sat in Parliament?

The press earned the label, Carlyle said in an 1840 lecture, because the reporters' gallery mattered more than the lords, bishops and commoners debating beneath it.

Which thinker coined the phrase 'banality of evil' while covering Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker?

Hannah Arendt, who had fled Nazi Germany herself, argued that Eichmann was no fanatic but an ordinary careerist who never thought about what he was doing.

Which city hosts the International Court of Justice, the only principal UN organ based outside New York?

The Hague houses the court in a palace built with 1.5 million dollars from the Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

Which Whig statesman, often called the founder of conservatism, denounced the French Revolution in a 1790 book?

Edmund Burke predicted the upheaval would end in corruption, violence and military dictatorship, years before Napoleon seized control of France.

Which author of Common Sense was later elected to France's National Convention despite speaking no French?

Thomas Paine voted for the republic but argued against executing Louis XVI, urging that the deposed king be exiled to the United States instead.

Which philosopher's 1859 essay On Liberty argued that society may restrain a person only to prevent harm to others?

John Stuart Mill had almost finished it when his wife Harriet died, and a 2022 analysis of the prose suggested she wrote enough of it to count as co-author.

Which writer's 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman blamed women's lower standing on their lack of education?

Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to a daughter, Mary Shelley, who grew up to write Frankenstein.

Which American philosopher imagined people choosing the rules of society from behind a 'veil of ignorance'?

John Rawls reasoned that people who did not know their own social status, gender or ethnicity would pick rules that are fair to everyone.

Which American writer's 1849 essay on civil disobedience grew out of a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax?

Henry David Thoreau withheld the tax to protest slavery and the Mexican-American War, and his essay later shaped the campaigns of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Which Prussian general's book On War defined war as the continuation of politics by other means?

Carl von Clausewitz left the book unfinished when he died in 1831, and his widow Marie published it the following year.

Which Victorian historian warned, in an 1887 letter to a fellow scholar, that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

Lord Acton was writing to the historian and future bishop Mandell Creighton, and added in the same letter that great men are almost always bad men.

Who is generally regarded as Britain's first prime minister, leading the government from 1721 to 1742?

Robert Walpole was offered 10 Downing Street as a personal gift by George II but took it only on behalf of his office, which is why premiers still live there.

Which 19th-century cartoonist popularized the donkey and the elephant as symbols of America's two main parties?

Thomas Nast drew the corrupt New York boss William Tweed so faithfully that officials in Spain used one of his cartoons to identify the fugitive.

What do political scientists call someone who enjoys a public good, like roads, without helping to pay for it?

A free rider is like a passenger who slips past the turnstile and travels on a train that everyone else has paid for.

Which term did psychologist Irving Janis apply to the flawed team decisions behind the Bay of Pigs invasion?

Groupthink, in Janis's account, sets in when a close-knit team prizes harmony over doubt; his main case study was the failed 1961 landing in Cuba.

Which 'law', coined by a naval historian in The Economist in 1955, says work expands to fill the time available?

Parkinson's law began as satire on the civil service: its author pointed out that Britain's Admiralty kept growing even as its number of ships declined.

Which term, named for a Michigan think-tank analyst, describes the range of policies the public finds acceptable?

The Overton window got its name only after Joseph Overton's death, when a colleague at his think tank developed the idea and attached his name to it.

Max Weber's three types of legitimate rule are traditional, rational-legal and which kind, typical of prophets?

Charismatic rule rests on devotion to one extraordinary leader, and Weber thought it too unstable to last: sooner or later it hardens into routine and bureaucracy.

Robert Michels's 1911 'iron law' holds that every large organization, however democratic, ends up as which form of rule?

Oligarchy was Michels's verdict after watching Europe's socialist parties, pledged to mass participation, become as leader-dominated as the conservatives they opposed.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote The Federalist Papers under which shared Roman pen name?

Publius was Hamilton's choice, honouring Publius Valerius, a founder of the Roman Republic whose better-known nickname meant 'friend of the people'.

Which American political scientist became, in 2009, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics?

Elinor Ostrom won for showing, from irrigation schemes, mountain villages and fisheries, that communities can manage shared resources themselves without ruining them.

Which magazine's vast 1936 straw poll wrongly forecast that Alf Landon would win the US presidency in a landslide?

The Literary Digest had mailed ten million questionnaires, yet its pick carried only Maine and Vermont, and the magazine folded within 18 months.

Samuel Huntington's 'third wave' of democratization is usually dated from which country's 1974 Carnation Revolution?

Portugal's dictatorship fell with almost no shots fired, and the revolt took its name from the flowers that crowds pushed into the soldiers' gun barrels.

Which scholar founded the neorealist school of world politics with his 1979 book Theory of International Politics?

Kenneth Waltz later argued that a world with more nuclear-armed states could be a safer one, because deterrence makes striking any of them too costly.

Which American philosopher's 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia argued that only a minimal state can be justified?

Robert Nozick wanted government limited to protecting people against force, theft and fraud, and the book won a US National Book Award in 1975.

Which 14th-century scholar's Muqaddimah explained the rise and fall of civilizations through group solidarity?

Ibn Khaldun wrote it in 1377 as the mere introduction to a planned history of the world; the title is simply the Arabic word for a prologue.

Which American diplomat's 1946 'long telegram' from Moscow inspired the Cold War policy of containment?

George Kennan later lamented that his idea had been militarised: he had favoured political and economic pressure on the Soviet Union, not an arms race.

In which country's historic Sejm could one deputy end the session and void its laws with the 'liberum veto'?

Poland's nobles held that all of them were equals whose consent was needed, and in the 1700s neighbouring rulers bribed deputies to use the rule and paralyse the country.

Which American scholar's 1936 book defined politics in its title as Who Gets What, When, How?

Harold Lasswell, who wrote his doctoral thesis on wartime propaganda, argued in the book that a small elite holds most of the influence.

Which ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, long thought lost, resurfaced as a manuscript in 1905?

The Arthashastra, traditionally credited to the royal adviser Kautilya, treats spies, taxes and war so bluntly that Max Weber said it made Machiavelli's The Prince look harmless.

The Non-Aligned Movement, for states siding with neither Cold War bloc, held its first summit in 1961 in which capital?

Belgrade hosted because Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito led the initiative, alongside Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia.

Which South American capital gave its name to the 1933 convention that set out the classic criteria for statehood?

Montevideo's convention sets four tests for a state: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Which Italian Marxist developed the theory of cultural hegemony in notebooks written while jailed by Mussolini's regime?

Antonio Gramsci filled more than 30 notebooks and some 3,000 pages behind bars, ranging from Italian history to folklore and popular culture.