J. Tyler Dickovick - Böcker

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.

In the 1980s and 1990s, much of the developing world experienced transitions to democracy accompanied by economic liberalization and decentralization of power to subnational governmental bodies. The process of decentralization has been studied intensively, but little attention has been paid so far to the recentralization that has occurred in some countries in the past decade. In this book, J. Tyler Dickovick seeks to illuminate how the processes of decentralization and recentralization are interrelated and what the dynamics of each is. He argues that decentralization occurs as a result of the decline in the power of the presidency, whereas recentralization occurs when the president resolves an extraordinary economic crisis. The processes of decentralization and recentralization, Dickovick further argues, have the same dynamics whether they occur in federal or unitary states. To test the theory, Dickovick compares a strong federal system, Brazil, with a weak one, South Africa, and compares these in turn with two unitary regimes, Peru and Senegal. Decentralization and Recentralization in the Developing World provides a much more nuanced understanding of when and why decentralization and recentralization happen, and what their importance is to intergovernmental shifts in power.