Anti-Climacus

AND: of course, there's the issue of what Karl Popper called falsifiability, which reveals the deeper, more significant link between science as such and political science. By falsifiability, Popper meant the existence of a statement that could be definitively proven false. For example: the sun revolves around the earth. Now there are a great many theses in political science that are not falsifiable ("democracy is the best form of government there is"), however obvious they may seem for other reasons ("totalitarian systems can never endure"). However, there are many theses about political science that are falsifiable: "the number of people voting in federal-level elections has decreased for the last fifty years," "parties make contact with voters fewer times now than they did 30 years ago," or "those who strongly affiliate themselves with a liberal or conservative ideology are less likely to vote than those who describe themselves as unaffiliated," to name but a few examples (and I choose these quite deliberately: they are all false, and I have the textbook to prove it). Now, you may not want to call this science as such, and may even wish to do so for the reasons Dave has outlined; but it would take a rather steadfast denial of reality to refuse to admit that Political Science can do something very, very similar to science as such.