Mark Irving Lichbach is Professor and Chair of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. A theorist interested in social choice and a comparativist interested in globalization, Lichbach explores the connections between collective action theories and political conflict as well as the connections between collective choice theories and democratic institutions. He is the author or editor of many books, including the award-winning The Rebel's Dilemma, and of numerous articles that have appeared in scholarly journals in political science, economics, and sociology. Alan S. Zuckerman is Professor of Political Science at Brown, University. Zuckerman's scholarship has focused on the analytical principles of comparative politics; the social context of political preferences, choice, and behavior; the individual and the state in established democracies; and the political structure of small groups. He is also the author, coauthor, editor, and co-editor of several books, including most recently Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (2007) and The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior (2005). He has also published numerous articles in the leading journals of political science, as well as monographs in the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Israel.

'This volume offers a completely revised, updated and exciting version of the well-known volume published by Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman a few years ago. Both editors have recruited a cast of outstanding scholars to offer a balanced and deep discussion of the main avenues of research in empirical political science. There is truly a lot to learn from this new Comparative Politics!' Carles Boix, Princeton University

• 1. Paradigms and pragmatism: comparative politics during the past decade Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman; 2. Thinking and working: discovery, explanation, and evidence in comparative politics Mark Irving Lichbach; 3. Advancing explanation in comparative politics: social mechanisms, endogenous processes, and empirical rigor Alan S. Zuckerman; 4. Strong theory, complex history: structure and configuration in comparative politics revisited Ira Katznelson; 5. Reconsiderations of rational choice in comparative and historical analysis Margaret Levi; 6. Culture in comparative political analysis Marc Ross; 7. Researching the state Joel S. Migdal; 8. An approach to comparative analysis, or a sub-field within a sub-field? Political economy Mark Blyth; 9. The global context of comparative politics Etel Solingen; 10. Comparative perspectives on contentious politics Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly; 11. Citizenship in democratic politics: density dependence and the micro-macro divide Robert Huckfeldt; 12. Macropolitics and microbehavior in comparative politics Christopher J. Anderson; 13. Back to the future: endogenous institutions and comparative politics Jonathan Rodden; 14. The comparative political economy of the welfare state Isabela Mares; 15. Making causal claims about the effect of 'ethnicity' Kanchan Chandra.