@Oliea98 Social Sciences in college are typically less work intensive than HS. They are mainly about you keeping up with reading or doing a decent amount of or doing good writing. There are less assignments but more care is expected. For example, you may have to more often do research papers that require you to read several books and primary articles to make it good whereas HS was often about review of and engagement with a single or a couple of sources. College (at least good classes with decent profs) is more about angle and analysis than it is length of essay and mechanics and grammar (a teacher won’t be impressed if an essay goes over the suggested length, in fact, they may grade more harshly). College Social Science = context and perspective whereas HS is mostly content and only does the former to a limited extent (AP classes encourage it to a certain level via say, the DBQ style questions on the Euro exam…but that is more so on spot source interpretation than it is gathering and understanding data and evidence). Evidence based argumentation is also more important in college. You typically use a variety of sources to develop your own thesis and angle on something as opposed to just parroting the thesis of the sources you choose. Often you are ask to engage with sources and authors with opposing opinions and put them in conversation with each other. It can take lots of time and reading in between the lines if you want to both do well and get something from it.
However, on average, I believe those two majors are just average, except that in history, they want all students to do one major research paper and because of that, two colloquia level classes are required, meaning that if you intend to cruise most of the time, there will be at least a couple of classes that make you seriously discuss and write. The regular political science major is more intensive than International Studies because it basically requires similar things to history (a research class requirement). The only thing that could end up surprisingly intensive are the 5 core requirements of International Studies. The rest of the categories, you can pretty much choose whatever and generally, from my own experience, it seemed that most pure (as in not cross-listed) political science courses were often less work intensive than history courses and classes cross-listed with history. May be because history had smaller classes quicker (as in an earlier year. Political science courses seem to offer many more large courses which of course will stray more toward a lower workload).
With that said: Note that political science at Emory is for some reason known for being more rigorous than normal by many. That reputation may come from the introductory courses which often have surprisingly hard grading TA’s on things like papers. And some teachers apparently write more challenging than expected exams (typically exams in social sciences are just “check-ups” to ensure you’re keeping up with the material so they are usually very easy. Nothing like, say, an AP exam. Again, most serious classes focus on writing and discussion when possible, so when any instructor gives exams that are more than memorization based essays and some basic short-answer and multiple choice questions, folks are surprised).