Cover -- Half-title -- Series-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Contributors -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- 1 Paradigms and Pragmatism: Comparative Politics during the Past Decade -- Introduction -- The chapters -- The Messy Center: Big-Picture Pragmatism -- Pushing against the Mainstream: Culture and Constructivism -- Fortifying the Center: Research Paradigms and Causal Analysis -- Fortifying the Center: Linking Structure and Action and Exploring Causal Patterns -- The Future of the Center: Constructivism and Causality -- Final words -- 2 Thinking and Working in the Midst of Things: Discovery, Explanation, and Evidence in Comparative Politics -- Introduction -- Claim: Comparative Politics as Chemistry and Physics -- Counterclaim: Comparative Politics as Literature and Art -- Origins of the present crisis of understanding -- The First Attempt to Creatively Deepen Variable Analysis Was the Search for Paradigms -- Discover a difficulty -- Discovery = Big Problems -- Discovery = Thorny Puzzles -- Discovery = Core Difficulty -- Suggest an explanation -- Explanation = Big Concepts -- Explanation = Mechanisms -- Explanation = Institutions -- Explanation = Middle-Range Causal Arguments -- Provide some evidence -- Evidence = Stylized Facts -- Evidence = Designs for Establishing Causality -- Evidence = Analytic Narratives -- Multiple Paradigms: Deadening Metaphysics or Vitalizing Frictions? -- Deadening Metaphysics -- Vitalizing Frictions -- Comparative comparativists: paradigmatic and pragmatic -- 3 Advancing Explanation in Comparative Politics: Social Mechanisms, Endogenous Processes, and Empirical Rigor -- Explanations in comparative politics -- Explanations with social mechanisms -- From optimization and selfishness to bounded rationality, heuristics, and social learning.

From exogenous to endogenous preferences and identities -- Social learning as an instrumental choice and as a social process -- Social mechanisms in recent research in comparative politics: partisanship and voting -- Social mechanisms in recent research in comparative politics: political violence -- Applying social mechanisms in empirical analysis -- An application to partisanship -- An application to political violence -- Social mechanisms and rigorous empirical analysis in alternative modes of explanation in comparative politics -- Conclusions and implications -- 4 Strong Theory, Complex History: Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics Revisited -- I -- II -- III -- IV -- 5 Reconsiderations of Rational Choice in Comparative and Historical Analysis -- A methodologial shift -- The model of rational choice: Neither neoclassical economics nor public choice -- Influences -- Comparative and Historical Rational Choice -- The limits and possibilities of comparative rational choice -- Reconsidering the Behavioral Assumption -- Power -- Conclusion -- 6 Culture in Comparative Political Analysis -- Introduction -- Culture and cultural analyses of politics -- The centrality of psychocultural narratives and interpretations in cultural analyses of politics -- Psychocultural Narratives and Interpretations -- Cultural Expressions and Enactments -- Interpretations and Narratives as Methodological Tools -- Two Examples -- Critique of cultural analyses of politics -- Unit-of-Analysis Issues -- Within-Culture Variation Can Be Substantial -- Distinguishing Culture from Other Concepts -- Culture and Change -- Mechanisms Underlying Cultural Explanations -- Cultural Explanations Are "Just-So" Stories and Not Causal Accounts -- Conclusion: Linking culture to choice and institutions -- 7 Researching the State -- Introduction -- The difficulty in comparing states.

Image and practices: the tension of a singular template and multiple dynamics -- The Image of the State: The Two Faces of Domination and Allegiance -- The Practices of the State: The Growing Diversity of States in the Twentieth Century -- New approaches to the comparative study of states -- Political Trajectories -- Integrated Comparative Analysis -- Toward a multilayered, multiparadigm analysis of states -- 8 An Approach to Comparative Analysis or a Subfield within a Subfield?: Political Economy -- Introduction - and a few caveats -- Political economy: what it was and how it (unexpectedly) came about -- The (Unexpected) Rebirth of Political Economy -- Interests, institutions, and ideas as explanatory alternatives -- Concepts and Questions -- Interest-Based Political Economy: Origins -- Institutional Political Economy: Origins -- Constructivist Political Economy: Origins -- Extensions of interest-based political economy -- Trade, Mobility, and Politics -- Assets, Skills, and Compensation -- Interest-Based Theories: Strengths and Weaknesses -- Developments in institutional political economy -- Chosen Structures That Structure Choices? -- Non-Game-Theoretic Extensions: The Developmental State Literature -- Institutionalist political economy: strengths and weaknesses -- Beyond coalitions and institutions: ideational political economy -- Ideas as Resources and Conventions -- Ideas as Governance Technologies -- Ideational Political Economy: Strengths and Weaknesses -- The Link Not Made? Rational Choice Theory and Political Economy -- Conclusions: comparing approaches and the question of boundaries -- 9 The Global Context of Comparative Politics -- Structure, rationality, and culture in domestic-international linkages -- Structure -- Rationality -- Culture -- Hybrids ("Paradigm Busters").

Domestic-international linkages and the comparative politics of east asia and the middle east -- The Sources of Competing Models of Political Survival -- Structural Sources -- Rational Sources -- Culture -- The Consequences of Models of Political Survival -- Structural Consequences -- Rationality -- Culture -- Conclusions -- 10 Comparative Perspectives on Contentious Politics -- Common properties of contentious politics -- Interactions, Claims, and Governments -- Proximate Effects -- Political Opportunity Structures -- Formation of Collective Actors -- Performances and Repertoires -- The evolution of the field -- The Political Process Approach -- Skocpol on Revolutions -- Rational Choice and Resource Mobilization -- McCarthy and Zald Focus on Social Movement Organizations -- The Construction of Contention -- Scott Takes Constructivism South -- Searches for Synthesis -- Mechanisms and processes of contention -- Mobilization: A Cluster of Mechanisms -- Demobilization: A Different Cluster of Mechanisms -- Two distinctive forms of contentious politics -- Social Movements -- Capacity and Contention -- From Nondemocracy to Democracy -- Special-Purpose Associations -- Lethal Conflicts and Civil Wars -- Contentious politics and comparative politics -- Extending Scope Conditions in China -- Transitions between Forms of Contention -- Transnational Contention and Global Social Movements -- Open questions in the study of contentious politics -- Episodes versus Discrete Forms of Conflict -- The Methodological Conundrum -- Ethnographic Fieldwork -- Naturalistic Experiments -- Nonmainstream Quantitative Analysis -- Where next? -- 11 Citizenship in Democratic Politics: Density Dependence and the Micro-Macro Divide -- Introduction and overview -- Patterns of interdependence in the study of comparative politics -- Levels of meaning in the study of democratic politics.

Ecological fallacies, individualistic fallacies, and the problem of interdependence -- Comparative politics as a general case of multilevel analysis -- Data problems and exemplary efforts -- Social networks as the connecting tissue between individuals and aggregates -- Implications for comparative analysis -- The micro-macro divide in political capacity -- Implications for alternative visions of politics -- Cultural Theories -- Structural Theories -- Rational Actor Theories -- A comparative vision of democratic politics and the vote: a reprise -- Conclusion: the importance of specific patterns of social relations -- 12 Nested Citizens: Macropolitics and Microbehavior in Comparative Politics -- Mixed ancestry: origins of research on comparative mass politics -- The pieces of the puzzle: multilevel models in comparative research on mass politics -- Some examples: representational structures and voter behavior -- The ties that could bind: nested citizens and structuralists, rationalists, and culturalists -- Some last words: looking for a grand theory of multilevel politics? -- 13 Back to the Future: Endogenous Institutions and Comparative Politics -- Starting with a stylized fact: electoral rules and the welfare state -- Causal mechanisms -- Empirical attempts to illuminate mechanisms -- The endogeneity problem -- Empirical strategies to confront endogeneity -- Econometric Analysis -- Analytical History -- Natural Experiments -- Field Experiments -- Conclusions -- 14 The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State -- The structural determinants of social spending: the role of economic development -- Openness -- The Systematic Clustering of Policies: Accounting for Cross-National Differences among Welfare State Regimes -- Welfare Regimes in Developing Countries -- Stability and change in social policies -- Conclusion.

15 Making Causal Claims about the Effect of "Ethnicity".