American politics concerns the study of American institutions and political behavior. At Columbia and elsewhere, American politics is one of the largest subfields in terms of faculty and students, and the field has been responsible for generating many methodological innovations in the discipline.

The department engages in the full range of topics in the study of institutions, including in areas often neglected even in top departments: bureaucracy and the oversight of regulatory agencies, state politics, courts, and electoral rules and in particular primaries. In the area of political behavior research, the department also engages a broad range of topics, including the politics of race and ethnicity, voting, political psychology, and connections between public opinion and policy. A number of Columbia scholars pursue both the institutional and behavioral lines of work, and they have contributed substantially as well to the historical study of American political development from both institutional and behavioral perspectives.

American politics scholars are also among the discipline's leaders in the design of field experiments and the study of elections.

With its broad geographic scope, comparative politics covers a diverse range of research questions: Why are some countries democratic while others are not? What accounts for variation in welfare policies across countries and over time? How do political institutions shape economic development? Under what conditions do ethnic identities become politically relevant and how does their politicization affect political outcomes? Why does political violence occur and what are its effects? How do citizens learn about and understand the actions of political elites? A hallmark of comparative research addressing such questions at Columbia is its methodological diversity, with students and scholars drawing on case studies, statistics, formal modeling, field experiments, ethnography, and historical analysis in their research. 

Columbia's comparativists also often draw on their deep substantive knowledge of particular regions--including Africa, East Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East--to address questions that are important to these regions and also to political science research more generally. The comparative subfield at Columbia is well-integrated with other subfields, with frequent intellectual engagement occurring  with scholars in American politics and international relations. 

International relations is traditionally divided into two main fields: international security (the study of war, conflict, peace, etc.,) and international political economy (trade, foreign direct investment, international finance, etc.). However, it increasingly includes other areas of global concern, including the environment, human rights, and international law, as well as fields that span substantive areas, such as the study of international organization.

Columbia has been known for a long time as one of the very top places to study international security. The international relations group cooperates with comparative politics colleagues in mounting one of the strongest programs in the study of civil wars.

Faculty in the department use a wide range of theories and a variety of methods, from formal models to statistical analyses, to case studies and archival research. They urge students to deploy multiple methods and to deal with alternative explanations. Most of the group's graduate students publish revised versions of their dissertations either as a book or as a series of articles.

Political economic theory spans the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations, and therefore complements students' interests in those fields.

Political economic theorists work with formal models of political institutions and behavior. The group's faculty have developed influential theories of elections, conflict, legislatures, and bureaucratic politics. These theories are useful for motivating empirical work, and increasingly they form the basis of experimental research as well.

Students interested in political economic theory should acquire a strong background in mathematics or microeconomics.

In the last decade or so, political methodology has emerged as a distinct subfield of political science. 

Political methodologists study existing statistical techniques and develop new ways to use statistics to estimate and identify political effects and make sense of political data. Their role in the discipline is similar to that of econometricians in economics, whose main purpose is to understand the most efficient and accurate ways to test hypotheses and analyze data.

In the past, most political methodologists maintained a strong substantive focus in one of the traditional subfields while also working on questions of political methodology. Increasingly, however, political methodologists are less attached to a traditional subfield and focus primarily on improving the discipline's ability to make causal inferences from data.

The department has become one of the discipline’s leaders in the area of mathematical models of political institutions and collective behavior, often referred to as “formal theory" or "game theory."

The department is a leader in another emerging methodology, the use of field experiments to study political outcomes. The use of randomized control trials conducted in the field has influenced social science research generally over the last decade, and the department is at the forefront of this development. Scholars in the department have used field experiments to study issues such as political participation in the United States and dispute resolution in Africa. Research in experimental methods complements other methods, including game theory, quantitative analysis, survey research, and qualitative methods.

Political theory has customarily consisted of the history of political thought and normative/systematic political theory, with the latter divided between Anglo-American and continental approaches, although this divide has eased in recent years.

Globalization has brought a sharp increase in interest in non-Western styles of political theory, in issues of constitutionalism and democracy across the globe, in global justice, and in comparative political theory. Columbia's political theory section is particularly strong in the history of political thought, in analytical political theory, in legal theory, constitutionalism, democratic theory, theories of human rights, and theories of justice. The group also has strength in the burgeoning new field of comparative political theory.

The department’s theory section is one of the leading groups in the country.