Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure

by Mark Irving Lichbach , Alan S. Zuckerman

• ISBN13: 9780521712347
• ISBN10: 0521712343
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780511474590
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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. His most recent books are Partisan Families: The Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (with Joseph Dasovic and Jennifer Fitzgerald), the winner of the International Society of Political Psychology's award for the best book published in 2007, and The Social Logic of Politcs: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior (2005). Zuckerman edits the book series on The Social Logic of Politics for Temple University Press. During the spring semester 2007, he was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xi
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xv
Paradigms and Pragmatism: Comparative Politics During the Past Decade	p. 1
Thinking and Working in the Midst of Things: Discovery, Explanation, and Evidence in Comparative Politics	p. 18
Advancing Explanation in Comparative Politics: Social Mechanisms, Endogenous Processes, and Empirical Rigor	p. 72
Strong Theory, Complex History: Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics Revisited	p. 96
Reconsiderations of Rational Choice in Comparative and Historical Analysis	p. 117
Culture in Comparative Political Analysis	p. 134
Researching the State	p. 162
An Approach to Comparative Analysis or a Subfield within a Subfield? Political Economy	p. 193
The Global Context of Comparative Politics	p. 220
Comparative Perspectives on Contentious Politics	p. 260
Citizenship in Democratic Politics: Density Dependence and the Micro-Macro Divide	p. 291
Nested Citizens: Macropolitics and Microbehavior in Comparative Politics	p. 314
Back to the Future: Endogenous Institutions and Comparative Politics	p. 333
The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State	p. 358
Making Causal Claims About the Effect of "Ethnicity"	p. 376
References	p. 413
Author Index	p. 481
Subject Index	p. 494
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