II applaud you for having discovered all that before college.
Is political science a science? No. At least not any more so, probably much less, than most econometric economics can be considered a science. Although if you consider history to be a science then most econometric political science and economics are historical sciences in the sense that the best they can usually do is form statistical interpretations and analyses of past data. Sure political scientists still try to make predictions and search for general laws, but the former are generally unsuccessful and none of the latter have yet been found by their modern positivist methods.
I’m a doctoral candidate in political science at Louisiana State University. My primary field, however, is political philosophy and theory (which I think is the true and original political science). My second field is international relations though and I am somewhat familiar with how things are done in comparative politics and American politics.
Academic political science is rather dismal and it does support and has helped to create the status quo. Was it Rothbard who pointed out that the statistical methods tend to have that effect? That they tend to make one a left of center statist? Researchers tend to be only interested in doing research on things that are easily amenable to statistical methods and promise quick and easy publication. Thus, important issues get ignored.
In any event, you’ll find that a lot of political science involves explaining state behavior. (Some theories don’t even study states per se but rather the international system (systemic variables) as a whole.) There is some study of individual level variables though. For example, those who do international political psychology attempt to study the psychology of political leaders. They are interested in correlating things like the president’s need for power, affiliation and achievement, or his operational code, or his cognitive complexity, with foreign policy preferences or behavior. My first academic conference paper was actually an attempt to correlate self-esteem with foreign policy behavior. While the results were interesting, I had given up the project as futile before I even finished. The way that such research is done is called at-a-distance measurement. One such method is called verbs-in-context. The researcher actually attempts to code a political leader’s speeches and/or interviews, assigning different values to different words or phrases in order to create variables amenable to statistical analysis. To improve objectivity, researchers will have a number of coders and do tests to determine how much agreement there is among the coders.
As one example of state level research, I give you power preponderance theory. One thing researchers attempt to do when testing this theory is try to determine state dissatisfaction with the status quo. Now, obviously, states are not people, so they can’t go ask them. Researchers of this theory also don’t bother with interviewing or doing at-a-distance measurement of the political leaders. No. They tried using UN General Assembly votes as a proxy variable but it turned out states generally all vote the same in the general assembly. They tried measuring alliances but, for example, all states in South America are allied with all the other states in South America. So those two methods didn’t work. If I remember correctly, they then turned to measuring changes in military spending as a percentage of GDP. I don’t need to tell you, I’m sure, that there could be many other reasons for this proxy variable to change other than dissatisfaction with the status quo. Nonetheless, it is often forgotten that one’s proxy variable is nothing more than a proxy, and a shaky one at that, and in their written conclusions the proxy variable comes to be treated as the actual variable they want to test.
Little or no progress has been made in modern academic political science. At best, old theories get picked apart bit by bit before being replaced by new theories that are often just the old theories in new clothing. Some researchers remain die-hard adherents to some theory in its pure form but over time you often see younger scholars using the collection of theories as a tool bag from which to choose what appears to be the most appropriate tool for the particular job.
A praxeological political philosophy and political theory would, I think, be truly scientific and not dismal at all.