So i kind of developed some disillusionment with political science over the last year, especially the last semester. Besides my own so so performance with the discipline, a few things have come into question in my mind. One, taking two semesters of statistics has, more than anything else perhaps, left me skeptical of any attempts to use statistics to make a point or prove something. Sure lots of people (myself in the future included probably) use it sloppily, but even the best stuff out there often seems sensitive to assumptions used, specific measurements, etc. I'm just not convinced that it really reveals much.

I also took two formal modeling/game theory courses. While I actually liked game theory, I sometimes wonder about its contributions to a lot of the works where it is used. It is nice to formalize logic and identify assumptions, etc, explicitly, but at the same time it really just seems like taking what you have elsewhere said in words (or what you should have said in words but didn't) and saying it in math instead. This may make the logic clearer for some, especially the mathematically inclined, but i'm not sure it really adds that much to a lot of papers. Plus, I feel like people use it to "prove" things, which i don't think is necessarily legitimate, as the results you get seem totally dependent on the assumptions you put in. I mean as long as this is acknowledged that's fine, and useful insights can still be drawn (for instance by showing that certain results follow from a range of plausible specifications of a model), but I feel like people are often not upfront about the limitations, whether intentionally or not.

In general, I think that political science thinks of itself a lot like economics, trying to find rules that generally explain behavior/actions. In economics though, there are often a lot of actors such that even if some deviate, they balance out and do behave in predictable ways. I feel like in political science however, there are often too few actors for this to be valid, especially if the unit of analysis is country. Then a few actors (controlled in many instances by a few people) have much power to change results, and it is hard to model processes that depend on the whims or choices of a few people (often in complicated or uncertain situations). There may be some topics of political science (voting behavior perhaps) where these arguments/techniques are valid, but for comparative government/international relations i fear they're not.

All this being said, my game theory and stats professors were obviously very very brilliant people, as were other profs i have had. Concerning the former two sets, I assume that if they are so smart they must also see a greater importance/usefulness to their disciplines, so i am somewhat willing to take them at their word, so to speak. With a lot of the people who do more substantive stuff, however, I feel that often the thing that impresses me about them is not their use of quantitative or formal methods (even when they themselves believe in them and employ them often) but just their knowlege of history, organizations, political actors, etc. I sometimes wonder if i should just focus on learning a lot of particulars about the places/topics i want to study instead of focusing so much on the techniques, but i know i'm expected to know the techniques, and they may actually be useful down the road (plus they are paying me, even if rather modestly, to learn them, so i should probably give it a shot). Perhaps some time off and/or independent study (though i don't know how long I will keep up the latter) will give me a new (hopefully more positive?) perspective-we shall see.