Political Science gets science

I was always curious what was 'science' about political science - they didn't seem to do experiments - use the scientific method - etc etc etc. It looks like they might be changing that a bit (of course we've seen all those fMRI politics studies - and you can guess what I think of them).

(AP) - Is there any science in political science? For decades, scholars in the field have battled over how negative campaign ads affect voter turnout, whether people become more conservative with age, whether opposition to welfare and affirmative action is an expression of principled ideology or veiled racism, and a host of other fundamental questions. None is truly resolved.

That has made a number of researchers conclude they've been going about it the wrong way. "Until a few years ago, political scientists didn't even do experiments," says Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "They conducted surveys. But it's very hard to discover causation from a survey. For instance, there is a correlation between being partisan and being more likely to vote, but does being partisan make you vote, or does voting make you more partisan? Or are they not causally related?"

Now political scientists have caught experiment fever, and more, applying well-vetted principles of psychology and even doing brain scans. "The direction is toward cognitive science and neuroscience," says James Druckman of Northwestern University.