Political science is an evolving and pluralistic discipline, relying on a variety of methods and styles of inquiry. It adopts and develops insights and approaches from microeconomics, history, ethics, data sciences, mathematics (for instance game theory and social choice theory), statistics, affective and cognitive psychology, and even (rather recently) neurobiology and genetics.

Political scientists seek to offer simple, clear, and testable explanations of political phenomena?which ideally allow for prediction (e.g. democracies don?t go to war with each other). Political scientists puzzle over causal inference. They pursue enduring questions, such as: is the international system more stable when it is bi-polar or multi-polar? They revisit political history with ideas and tools from political science. Finally, political scientists draw lessons from their inquiries for good public policy, for good government, and for good citizenship ? and for better political science, including better methods.