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Political science is the study of politics following rigorous procedures that qualify the discipline as science. It studies the power relations between individuals, groups, or between those and the state, trying to discover regularities in human or institutional behavior. Those regularities are becoming part of knowledge which is commonly known "theory". Then the knowledge from theory is again confronted with the empirical evidence, and new regularities are added to the theory. The beauty of this game is that it never ends.
Since it is often considered to be just an intellectual exercise, I need to emphasize that political science is or should be firstly science. Therefore, the members of the discipline need to consider themselves scientists before being intellectuals, because science is or should be objective and the product of a scientist is always replicable and testable.
In order to qualify as scientific, a preposition or theory in political science should aim at explaining and predicting political phenomena. While an empirical law can make accurate predictions, it can hardly explain a political phenomenon. Thus, to explain a particular phenomenon that occurs in politics is necessary to subsume it to a generalizing law. However, this generalizing law can not be achieved but only through a rigurous deductive model.
Such conception of the scientific explanation in political science belongs to William Riker 'Political Science and Rational Choice' (in J.Alt, Kenneth Shepsle Perspective in Positive Political Economy, Cambridge University Press, 1990). With political science and economy coming closer each other than ever before in the last fifty years, it is probably inevitable that political scientists will employ more and more in political science the instruments previously used by economists. We shall lose probably most of the charm of the humanities, but our our explanations will win much more rigor.
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