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Toward a Political Science Discipline

Harry Eckstein's 1973 classic article “Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry” is critically reviewed. In that article, Eckstein proposes that the scope of politics can be ascertained through a taxonomic exercise that he labels progressive differentiation. In so doing, he delimits political study to the systematic analysis of authority patterns, which he defines as the “set of asymmetric relations among hierarchically ordered members of a social unit that involves the direction of the unit.” This taxonomy is provocative in that it rules out of the discipline's domain standard fare within contemporary political science, concerning exchange among equals (virtually all of economic reasoning) and exchange between states (virtually all of international relations). An alternative delimitation is proposed, building on other insights from Eckstein's corpus but taking off from current research practice. Four subfields—political theory, comparative politics, democratic institutions, and international relations—are defined in such a way as to give coherence to the political science discipline.