Political Science

Political science studies government, institutions and political behavior systematically, comparing how power is actually organized and exercised across different systems rather than treating politics as a branch of history, law or philosophy alone. The discipline gained its first dedicated American graduate program in 1880, when the legal scholar John W. Burgess founded the School of Political Science at Columbia University, establishing political science as a subject with its own faculty, curriculum and doctoral training distinct from the law and history departments it had previously been taught within.

Religious institutions are political actors as well as spiritual ones, holding property, exercising authority over members, negotiating with states and sometimes governing territory directly, and political science supplies the atlas with the analytical vocabulary, institution, authority, governance structure, needed to describe that dimension of a religious body accurately alongside its doctrine and practice. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a religious body's internal governance or its relationship to state power is part of what the atlas describes, distinguishing a body's constitutional structure from the doctrine that structure was built to serve.