The article tries to link the development of American political science with a major concern of the discipline, democracy. However, the concrete forms of this development have been molded by different factors (e.g. practical politics, economic interests and cultural variants). Looking at the interplay of these factors, this paper traces the rise of American political science to a hegemonic position in the world, from the founding of the School of Political Science at Columbia University in 1880 to the heyday of behavioralism at the beginning of the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of America's role as a superpower and with the growth of representative democracy. A possible decline in the position of American political science is envisaged because of changing international power relations, problems of representative democracy and the present diversification of the discipline, which may lead to a situation where there is no American nor any other geographically specific political science, but instead different political discourses depending on locality, situation and politics.
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