What do you think?
Rate this book
Comparative Politics Today: A World View, Update Edition
Comparative Politics Today is the text that defined the discipline of comparative politics and continues to set the standard for the course with and the most current country study chapters available. The chapters on England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, India, and the United States have all been thoroughly updated. As in the previous edition, theoretical chapters (Chapters 1-7) at the beginning of the book explore the "purpose of government" and provide students with a framework for understanding comparative politics. The theoretical section is followed by 12 individual country studies. All country studies are written by pre-eminent specialists on that particular country, ensuring that students have the most reliable information and insights into the political systems of those nations.
832 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
37 people are currently reading
355 people want to read
About the author
Gabriel A. Almond
34 books23 followersGabriel Abraham Almond
Almond was born in Rock Island, Illinois, U.S., the son of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. He attended the University of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and worked with Harold Lasswell. Almond completed his Ph.D. degree in 1938, but his doctoral dissertation, Plutocracy and Politics in New York City, was not published until 1998, because it included unflattering references to John D. Rockefeller, a benefactor of the University of Chicago.
Almond taught at Brooklyn College (now the City University of New York) from 1939 to 1942. With U.S. entry into World War II, Almond joined the Office of War Information, analyzing enemy propaganda, and becoming head of its Enemy Information Section. After the war, Almond worked for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in post-war Germany.
Almond returned to academic life in 1947 and taught at Yale University (1947–1950) and (1959–1963), Princeton University (1950–1959), and Stanford University (1963–1993). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961.[1] He was chair of the political science department at Stanford from 1964 to 1969 and spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the University of Belo Horizonte, and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Although Almond retired in 1976 and became an emeritus professor at Stanford, he continued to write and teach until his death.
Almond chaired the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics for many years and was president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for 1965-66. In 1981, he received APSA's James Madison Award, which is given to a political scientist who has made a "distinguished scholarly contribution" during his or her career. He was also the first recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in 1997. Almond died in Pacific Grove, California aged 91.
Work
Almond broadened the field of political science in the 1950s by integrating approaches from other social science disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, into his work. He transformed an interest in foreign policy into systematic studies of comparative political development and culture. Almond's research eventually covered many topics, including the politics of developing countries, Communism, and religious fundamentalism.
Almond was a prolific author, publishing 18 books and numerous journal articles, and co-writing many others. His most famous work was The Civic Culture (1963), co-authored with Sidney Verba. It popularized the idea of a political culture - a concept that includes national character and how people choose to govern themselves - as a fundamental aspect of society. Almond and Verba distinguished different political cultures according to their level and type of political participation and the nature of people's attitudes toward politics. The Civic Culture was one of the first large-scale cross-national survey studies undertaken in political science and greatly stimulated comparative studies of democracy.
Almond also contributed to theoretical work on political development. In Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966), Almond and G. Bingham Powell proposed a variety of cultural and functional ways to measure the development of societies. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s, Almond's approaches came to define comparative politics.
Almond was born in Rock Island, Illinois, U.S., the son of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. He attended the University of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and worked with Harold Lasswell. Almond completed his Ph.D. degree in 1938, but his doctoral dissertation, Plutocracy and Politics in New York City, was not published until 1998, because it included unflattering references to John D. Rockefeller, a benefactor of the University of Chicago.
Almond taught at Brooklyn College (now the City University of New York) from 1939 to 1942. With U.S. entry into World War II, Almond joined the Office of War Information, analyzing enemy propaganda, and becoming head of its Enemy Information Section. After the war, Almond worked for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in post-war Germany.
Almond returned to academic life in 1947 and taught at Yale University (1947–1950) and (1959–1963), Princeton University (1950–1959), and Stanford University (1963–1993). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961.[1] He was chair of the political science department at Stanford from 1964 to 1969 and spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the University of Belo Horizonte, and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Although Almond retired in 1976 and became an emeritus professor at Stanford, he continued to write and teach until his death.
Almond chaired the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics for many years and was president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for 1965-66. In 1981, he received APSA's James Madison Award, which is given to a political scientist who has made a "distinguished scholarly contribution" during his or her career. He was also the first recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in 1997. Almond died in Pacific Grove, California aged 91.
Work
Almond broadened the field of political science in the 1950s by integrating approaches from other social science disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, into his work. He transformed an interest in foreign policy into systematic studies of comparative political development and culture. Almond's research eventually covered many topics, including the politics of developing countries, Communism, and religious fundamentalism.
Almond was a prolific author, publishing 18 books and numerous journal articles, and co-writing many others. His most famous work was The Civic Culture (1963), co-authored with Sidney Verba. It popularized the idea of a political culture - a concept that includes national character and how people choose to govern themselves - as a fundamental aspect of society. Almond and Verba distinguished different political cultures according to their level and type of political participation and the nature of people's attitudes toward politics. The Civic Culture was one of the first large-scale cross-national survey studies undertaken in political science and greatly stimulated comparative studies of democracy.
Almond also contributed to theoretical work on political development. In Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (1966), Almond and G. Bingham Powell proposed a variety of cultural and functional ways to measure the development of societies. For a period in the 1960s and 1970s, Almond's approaches came to define comparative politics.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 22, 2009
Informative, but horribly dry. Additionally, it spends a needless amount of time on a large number of basic concepts and subsequently glosses over some of the more important ones. A middling textbook, I suppose, but the material can be presented much better.
Read
September 12, 2013lets see
November 30, 2014
This is a college text on political systems. It compares various forms of government as well as the processes of each form. It also examines what political systems are used in the different regions of the world.
Read
May 1, 2020Versiunea aceasta este tradusă destul de prost, cu multe cuvinte legate între ele, greșeli de tipul din cauză/ datorită și cu un sentiment constant de exprimare diferită față de original. La nivel de conținut nu mă pronunț, fiind o primă lectură în direcția aceasta. Cea în engleză este și structurată diferit- cel putin ediția cea nouă.
May 5, 2018
Informative, but poorly written and structured. Sad.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews