Why does political science suck so bad?

Answer 1

Political science is a cesspool inhabited by a group of infernal miscreants:

1. Political theorists, who just make ^@$%.

2. Substantive researchers, who apply made-up &#%@.

3. Methodologists and formal theorists, who justify made-up %@^#.

These maniacal villains, conveniently gathered into one floor of one building of each aptly-named "department of Political Science", held a convention thousands of years ago in a determined effort to screw-up your life.

Anyone in politics, since it is, clearly, only called a science to make you take their %$&# seriously, can tell you that it never ends well. It is filled with people, and the lives of people are generally solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And this is what the professors plan to make of you.

First, they lure you in with the illusions of changing the world, learning about society, easy marks, and/or not having to do mathematics. They feed you these lies in order to make a large, quick, and easily-earned payoff from your tuition fees.1 In order to give you the idea of doing something vaguely applicable to the real world, you are to study a series of virtually completely unrelated courses, with little-to-no internal cohesion, and demonstrate your proficiency in their one paper hypotheses with terrible methodologies by concocting further lies, usually in the form of a paper or exam.2 Of course, by the end of that term you recall nothing of what you learned, but this does not bother you, since the goal of society is to get a degree to show-off, not learn anything in particular.

Through completing all of this work, which, to no avail, is neither thoroughly scientific nor particularly useful, you earn a wondrous B.A. in political science. Congratulations, old sport! But... wait? What's that, my undergraduate degree? You can't earn me any jobs since political science has no positions unless you become a professor? Well, then, I guess I'll just have to become a professor!3

So, after working valiantly and forgetting everything you ever knew, it turns out that the only way to make it worthwhile is to teach it. Thus the cabal of evil professors wins out; by forcing you to take graduate school in it and thereby teach, they lure you into their clutches to continue the dreadful cycle all over again. To provide funding for this unfortunate result, they have created academic journals, such as Politics or Political Economy, to build-up their street cred and milk the government for additional funding.

In conclusion, a succinct answer to your question would be something like: "Political science is a massive conspiracy designed to ruin your life." Except I cannot say that, else I will be ruined by the powers that be.4 Therefore, I implore you to consider pursuing political science as both a useful, and valuable subfield to pursue your own academic interests. The best of luck to you, and, if you take my academic job offer, I will kill you.

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Footnotes

1 - And we know the golden rule for any arts sub-field is that, "those who cannot do mathematics do arts." This holds for political science.

2 - Papers in political science usually consist of three parts: 1. procrastination of said paper until the night of its due date; 2. constructing an arbitrary, poorly-worded, and difficult-to-argue thesis; 3. subsequently praying to your selected deity (or lack thereof) that the professor will pass it. Not that he marks it anyway, since that's what graduate students are for.

3 - If the bitter melancholy of the fact that the only truly political science-based jobs are teaching political science to other people, then you are likely too dumb for even this discipline. To learn more about sarcasm, consider switching to English.

4 - And I would like to thank the man or, in this case, my host institution for its generous donation of funding to the furtherance of my academic career in this field to continue the road to freedom from ignorance. And ramen. I can't wait to stop eating that &$#@.

Answer 2

Political science is a field that can be perceived as challenging due to its complexity and the ever-changing nature of politics. It involves studying human behavior and governance, which can be messy and unpredictable. However, it is a crucial field for understanding societal dynamics and informing policy decisions.