Comparative Politics : Rationality, Culture, and Structure

Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure is a completely revised second edition of the volume that guided thousands of scholars through the intellectual demands and gratifications of comparative political science. Retaining a focus on the field’s research schools, it now pays parallel attention to the pragmatics of causal research. Mark Lichbach begins with a review of discovery, explanation and evidence and Alan Zuckerman argues for explanations with social mechanisms. Ira Katznelson, writing on structuralist analyses, Margaret Levi on rational choice theory, and Marc Ross on culturalist analyses, assess developments in the field’s research schools. Subsequent chapters explore the relationship among the paradigms and current research: Joel Migdal examines the state; Mark Blyth adds culturalist themes to work on political economy; Etel Solingen locates the international context of comparative politics; Doug McAdam, Charles Tilly, and Sidney Tarrow address contentious politics; Robert Huckfeldt explores multi-level analyses; Christopher Anderson describes nested voters; Jonathan Rodden examines endogenous institutions; Isabela Mares studies welfare states, and Kanchan Chandra proposes a causal account of ethnic politics. The volume offers a rigorous and exciting assessment of the past decade of scholarship in comparative politics.

Mark Irving Lichbach is Professor and Chair of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. A theorist interested in social choice and a comparativist interested in globalization, Lichbach explores the connections between collective action theories and political conflict as well as the connections between collective choice theories and democratic institutions. He is the author or editor of many books, including the award-winning The Rebel's Dilemma, and of numerous articles that have appeared in scholarly journals in political science, economics, and sociology.

Alan S. Zuckerman is Professor of Political Science at Brown, University. Zuckerman's scholarship has focused on the analytical principles of comparative politics; the social context of political preferences, choice, and behavior; the individual and the state in established democracies; and the political structure of small groups. He is also the author, coauthor, editor, and co-editor of several books, including most recently Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (2007) and The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior (2005). He has also published numerous articles in the leading journals of political science, as well as monographs in the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Israel.