Political science and psychology have sustained deeper cross-fertilization than either has with closer fields.

Evidence

Interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, never above a modest level, has been as sustained between political science and psychology as between any two social sciences, which is surprising considering that each discipline has longer common borders with other fields—political science with history and economics, psychology with sociology and anthropology. The collaboration has persisted through three successive 20-year eras differing in preferred topics of study, theoretical explanations, and high-table approved methods. For clarifying uniformity, each era will be labeled here by its popular topics of study: Thus the first 1940s and 1950s interdisciplinary flourishing will be called the “personality and culture” era; the second, 1960s and 1970s wave, the “attitudes and voting behavior” era; and the third flourishing, which dominated the 1980s and 1990s, the “ideology and decision” era. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the history of disciplinary boundaries and how fields organize themselves along shared topics versus shared method.