While we have proudly waved the banner of Department of Government since our founding in 1910, the discipline we represent at Harvard is known in most universities as political science. Speaking most generally, political science is the organized study of political processes, institutions, and ideas. It is large in scale and internally as pluralistic as any part of the social sciences. Political science is a welcoming discipline, a crossroads where other fields meet and bring us substantive puzzles, theories, methods, and data.
These words apply especially well to our local community. In a pluralistic discipline, the Harvard Government Department is more pluralistic than almost any peer department. This diversity is ingrained in our departmental culture and is one of our major attractions to graduate and undergraduate students and to the faculty we wish to recruit and nurture.
— Timothy J. Colton
Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Department of Government