I posted this in the shitposting thread, but was asked to make a separate thread about it, so here goes:

Hi guys, I have been lurking a bit, but I was wondering what would be a reasonably accessible text for a first dip into political science for lay-people?

My background is deep in the natural sciences ( Maths/Phys ) with a sprinkle of Philosophy and Economics, so I have only limited background knowledge in sociology, history and most social sciences.

In fact, that's why I'm trying to get some more understanding about these things. I've seen the economists cringe whenever some physicist wishes to base the financial system on "energy" or something, and similarly I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see proposals for things like back-doors in encryption algorithms.

Now, the way I reason is that if others can get Economics, Physics, Mathematics... so horribly wrong because they do not understand it, a safe assumption is probably that I'm similarly ignorant about the things I've never taken much time to study.

The problem is that as I similarly know from other fields, if I were to simply go find some source which "makes sense to me", I would expect to get trapped in the same echo-chamber and conspiracy theories as we see in many other fields.

So, for somebody with little academic background in the social sciences, what is a good and accessible introduction to political science?