Political Science Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
100 free Political Science trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Political science is the study of power: who gets it, how they keep it and what rules shape the game. These 100 questions span the canon (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu), the modern discipline (behavioralism, rational choice, the APSA) and the concepts every intro course covers: separation of powers, proportional representation, Duverger's law, soft power, the democratic peace. It is pitched for students, teachers and anyone who enjoys a quiz round that rewards knowing why first-past-the-post produces two parties or where the word gerrymander comes from. Every answer is cited so you can use it in class or at quiz night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who is the only US president to hold a PhD?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson: a political scientist by training, in 1913 he revived delivering the annual message to Congress in person, a practice Jefferson had dropped.
Q 02Which 1950s–60s movement pushed political science toward the scientific study of behavior?
Behavioral revolution
Robert Dahl and Philip Converse were among its leading figures; it favored surveys and empirical testing over legal texts.
Q 03In 1948, which newspaper's early edition wrongly announced 'Dewey Defeats Truman'?
Chicago Daily Tribune
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.
Q 04Game theorists devised their most famous dilemma in 1950 while working at which Cold War think tank?
RAND Corporation
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.
Q 05Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 trip that produced Democracy in America was officially meant to study what?
Prisons
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.
Q 06When ancient Athenians voted to banish a citizen for ten years, they wrote his name on what?
Pottery shards
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'.
Q 07The word 'boycott' comes from Charles Boycott, a land agent shunned by his community in which country?
Ireland
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.
Q 08The International Political Science Association (1949) grew out of an initiative by which body?
UNESCO
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.
Q 09Which Greek philosopher declared that "man is by nature a political animal"?
Aristotle
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.
Q 10In Plato's Republic, what is the name of the utopian city ruled by philosopher-kings?
Kallipolis
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.
Q 11Who argued in the Republic that justice is simply what benefits the stronger?
Thrasymachus
Thrasymachus: Socrates replies that rulers sometimes misjudge their own interest, so obeying them could end up harming the stronger after all.
Q 12Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to a member of which ruling family?
The Medici
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.
Q 13Machiavelli wrote that if a prince cannot be both, it is safer to be what?
Feared than loved
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.
Q 21According to Rousseau, only what has the right to legislate?
The general will
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'.
Q 22Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law famously championed which principle?
Separation of powers
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.
Q 23Which Russian ruler drew on Montesquieu when writing the Nakaz, a guide for lawmakers?
Catherine the Great
Q 14Which Renaissance figure does Machiavelli repeatedly cite approvingly in The Prince?
Cesare Borgia
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.
Q 15Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan while living in exile in which city?
Paris
Paris: while living there he also taught mathematics to the exiled young Prince of Wales, the future King Charles II.
Q 16Hobbes described life in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and" what?
Short
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.
Q 17On the famous title page of Hobbes's Leviathan, the crowned giant's body is made up of what?
Tiny people
Tiny people: Hobbes pictured the state as an 'artificial man' whose strength comes from the many subjects who make it up.
Q 18Locke's First Treatise of Government is a line-by-line refutation of which author?
Robert Filmer
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.
Q 19Locke's Two Treatises was published anonymously shortly after which event?
The Glorious Revolution
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.
Q 20Rousseau's The Social Contract opens: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in' what?
Chains
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.
Catherine the Great: her text upheld absolute rule, yet France still banned it as too liberal to publish.
Q 24Which Greek historian, a hostage in Rome, praised its balance of consuls, senate and assemblies?
Polybius
Polybius: the hostage became a mentor and friend to the commander Scipio Aemilianus, and was with him to watch Carthage destroyed in 146 BCE.
Q 25Beside the legislative and executive, Locke named a third power of government, covering war, peace and alliances, called what?
Federative
Federative: Locke conceded it could hardly be split from the executive, because putting the public force under two commands would invite 'disorder and ruin'.
Q 26In which essay did Max Weber define the state by its monopoly on legitimate force?
Politics as a Vocation
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.
Q 27Robert Dahl argued that no country is a true democracy, so he called the closest real-world systems what?
Polyarchies
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.
Q 28Who popularized the term "soft power"?
Joseph Nye
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.
Q 29Who wrote The End of History and the Last Man (1992)?
Francis Fukuyama
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.
Q 30Samuel Huntington's famous 1993 essay on conflict after the Cold War first appeared in which American magazine?
Foreign Affairs
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.