Comparative Politics: Integrating Theories, Methods, and Cases

Review
"Comparative Politics is the best text on the market. It encourages critical thinking, promotes a hands-on comparativist experience, and thoroughly engages students with the major themes, debates, and discussions in comparative politics." --Anastasia Kuz-Grady, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
"The mix of theory, methodology, and case studies introduces comparative analysis in an accessible way. My students appreciate the text's readability." --Cheryl Van Den Handel, Northeastern State University
An engaging and accessible introduction to the subject, Comparative Politics: Integrating Theories, Methods, and Cases gives students the methodological tools they need to answer the "big questions" in the field. The authors introduce methods early in the text and integrate them throughout, in Thinking Comparatively features, to help students develop a systematic way of thinking about comparative politics. Offering a hybrid format, the text's unique structure offers the best of thematic and country-by-country approaches. Sixteen succinct thematic chapters--organized around the "big questions" in the field--are followed by a separate section at the end of the book offering full-length profiles and case studies for twelve countries. Examples of some of the "big picture questions discussed in the thematic chapters are, "Why do countries have different institutions and forms of government? Why do some social revolutions succeed and endure while others fail? Why are some societies
subjected to terrorism and not others?" Each chapter integrates several standalone country case studies in Case in Context features; these features tie into the narrative, pose questions, and point students to the full case discussions in the country profiles section of the book.