Foundations of Comparative Politics
About this ebook
Foundations of Comparative Politics presents a scientific approach to the rich world of comparative inquiry, research, and scholarship, providing you a guide to cross-national comparison and why it matters. This condensed, more accessible format introduces you to the key questions in comparative politics, using brief insights from tools such as decision, social choice, and game theory to help you understand clearly why some explanations for political phenomena are stronger than others. Foundations concentrates on describing the core features of regimes and institutions and on analyzing how these fundamental attributes drive variation in the economic and political outcomes we care about most. This approach more closely replicates what comparative scholars do: constructing and testing theories on political phenomena over basic memorization of country-specific facts—to explain, rather than describe. Illustrated with current examples that show the application of theory, you will gain invaluable real-world skills in critical thinking and empirical analysis that you will carry with you long after the course is over.
About the author
William Roberts Clark is associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Capitalism, Not Globalism, and his articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Political Analysis, and European Union Politics, among other journals. He has been teaching at a wide variety of public and private schools (William Paterson College, Rutgers University, Georgia Tech, Princeton, New York University, and the University of Michigan) for over a decade.
Matt Golder was previously assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. He is the author of articles which have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Political Analysis among other journals. He has taught classes on comparative politics, advanced industrialized democracies, quantitative methods, and European politics at the University of Iowa, Florida State University, and the University of Essex.
Sona Nadenichek Golder was previously assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. She is the author of The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation, and has published articles in the British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, and European Union Politics. She teaches courses on European politics, democracies and dictatorships, comparative institutions, game theory, and comparative politics at Florida State University and was a Mentor-in-Residence for the 2007 Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models Summer Program at UCLA.