This book describes five paradigms of political explanation: rational choice theory, political psychology, community analysis, Marx, and Weber. It is a text for beginning students of political science and for more advanced students who want to reflect on modes of thought in political analysis.

In this concise but wide-ranging text, Alan Zuckerman introduces the reader to the various approaches to political explanation. He shows how researchers espousing different theoretical assumptions, levels of explanation, variables, and data come to offer conflicting accounts of the phenomena to be studied. He then introduces five paradigms of polit

People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. As most people live with others, members of their households influence each other's political decisions. How and what they think about politics and what they do are the outcomes of social processes. Applying varied statistical models to data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers. Wives and mothers sit at the centre of households: their partisanship influences the partisanship of everyone else, and the others affect them. Politics in households interacts with competition among the political parties to sustain bounded partisanship. People ignore one of the major parties and vary their preference of its major rival over time. Election campaigns reinforce these choices.

Italian politics continue to chart new institutional paths. As governments change without the apparent instability of previous decades, political parties transform themselves and personalist modes of governance emerge. New policy concerns - immigration and highway safety - join with perennial concerns - health reform, regional governments, and economic policy. A former Prime Minister, Roman Prodi, now serves as President of the European Commission, highlighting Italy's deepening integration into the European Union. The volume addresses core themes in the institutional transformation of the Italian Republic. Mario Caciagli is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Florence. Alan S. Zuckerman is Profesor Political Science at Brown University.

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.

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.

People decide about political parties by taking into account the preferences, values, expectations, and perceptions of their family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. As most people live with others, members of their households influence each other's political decisions. How and what they think about politics and what they do are the outcomes of social processes. Applying varied statistical models to data from extensive German and British household surveys, this book shows that wives and husbands influence each other; young adults influence their parents, especially their mothers. Wives and mothers sit at the centre of households: their partisanship influences the partisanship of everyone else, and the others affect them. Politics in households interacts with competition among the political parties to sustain bounded partisanship. People ignore one of the major parties and vary their preference of its major rival over time. Election campaigns reinforce these choices.

Brings together political scientists to assess the research schools that direct scholarship in comparative politics. The text examines rational choice theory, culturalist analysis, and structuralist approaches by applying them to the study of electoral politics, social movements and revolutions, political economy and the state. The essays return analysis to basic questions concerning the development of theory and the nature of explanations.