Political Science and International Relations is one of the optional subjects offered by the UPSC in the mains exam. It is a popular optional subject and one that many toppers have chosen in IAS Exam. It has been observed among many IAS aspirants that the syllabus for this optional subject is broad, and they desist from taking Political Science and International Relations (PSIR) as their optional subject.
Some key-points that will help you to opt for PSIR as your optional are highlighted below:
- Political science is one of the most informative and necessary subjects for any civil service exam aspirant looking forward to getting into the government as a civil servant.
- Any civil services aspirant who intends to serve as a bureaucrat must have a stronghold over the fundamentals of Political science and has to be well aware of the political climate around him/her.
This article will mention the advantages of Political Science optional in UPSC Mains exam.
Advantages of Political Science in UPSC Mains
There are many advantages to choosing Political Science Optional for civil services examination. They are given in points below:
- Indian polity is a crucial segment of the UPSC Prelims Syllabus.
- If the aspirants choose Political Science and International Relations as their UPSC Mains Optional subject, they will have to study this along with the prelims section thus saving time for other topics. This way their preparation for UPSC Prelims and Mains can be integrated.
- Being a slightly non-technical subject, the aspirants can easily comprehend and study this subject even if they don’t have political science as their background. The concepts are general and anyone who reads newspapers on a regular basis would be able to understand and study the subject.
- In the new revised syllabus, the factual parts have been omitted and hence, an understanding of the concepts is only required to write better answers in this paper.
- The impression that the syllabus for political science is vast is only partially true. In fact, a lot of the topics are repeated like Marxism, Marx, Marxist notions of state, Gramsci, etc.
- Many topics like thoughts of Mill, Bentham and Liberal notions of state, justice and democracy, etc. are pretty much interrelated.
- There are certain topics which will be covered in Paper-1 as well as Paper-2 of Political Science and International Relations. For example,
- Liberalism
- Feminism
- Ideas of Marxism
- Issues of Democracy
- Human Rights
- Environment, etc.
- Knowing a lot of content in this subject can also help in your IAS Current Affairs preparation.
- In the interview round a good knowledge of topics in Polity such as governance, international relations, etc. can be very handy.
After going through the advantages of choosing Political Science Optional, you may be interested in knowing the UPSC Political Science Syllabus which is given in the linked article.
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