Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, 2nd Edition (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

Comprehensive in scope and masterfully detailed, this is, by far, the best graduate reference book on Comparative Politics I have come across.

To say that Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure has gotten mixed reviews is an understatement. The book is quite heavy on the verbage and would probably be better suited to the graduate student going into the comparative politics subfield rather than undergraduates who may be taking an intro to CP course for general education credit. This book is no easy slog for graduate students either. One often has to spend a full day with this text to isolate the main concepts from the verbal soup, which can make things rather tedious at times.But on the bright side, the book is chalked full of literature citations that should be useful for the graduate comparativist and the main idea of the book to illustrate that rationality, culture, and structure each play an important role in the diverse subfield of comparative politics whether it be in ethic conflict, political economy, institutions, etc.My one wish is that they would put in a literature cited section at the end of each chapter, rather than just in the bibliography at the end because they cite a lot of literature in each section and it can be difficult if one has to stop reading to check a citation or finish reading a lengthy chapter and then struggle to locate said citation within a textbook full of them.Despite these complaints, the book provides a decent introduction to the field.

My review is for the actual Kindle product which does not have page numbers. This makes it impossible to cite in research, papers for classes, etc. I hope Kindle fixes this gap in capability for there is a large market share that requires page numbers to cite works.

like the book

returned it and no troubles with return

While a great compliation of leading political scientists, this book assumes a high level of proir familiarity with the topic matter. For the novice reader, this book was way over my head. For experts, I can not see why they would be reading a book by various authors as opposed to reading the works directly from the theorists cited.

Unless you are a master's or PhD student specializing solely in comparative politics, don't read this book. It was assigned to my comparative politics class (master's level) and everyone hated it. I trudged through 50 pages until I just couldn't take it anymore. Very poorly written and vague, but drenched in academic-sounding details.Lim's "Doing Comparative Politics" and Landman's "Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics" are much more clearly written and easier to understand.

Offers clarification and insight to broad field of politics.