Comparative Politics

This book should probably be named European Politics rather than Comparative Politics. I assign it in my senior-level European politics course.I have tried a lot of different European Politics textbooks over the years and this one is the best by far. The chapters are written by the world's most prominent scholars of European Politics. The book provides a useful introduction to the scholarly literature in European Politics, showing the main theories and questions on each topic. It uses the same terminology and conceptualization as the scholarly literature in this field. Each week, I assign one Caramani textbook chapter and two scholarly articles or book chapters on a topic.Most of my students have already taken the Intro to Comparative Politics course, so I assign chapters on the topics the intro course does not cover. For my European Politics course, I use the chapters on approaches, comparative method, structures/institutions, actors/processes, and EU/Globalization. At my university, the Intro to Comparative courses focuses on the history of the comparative subfield, comparative method, states, modernization, regimes, political violence, and cases. For the students who did not take Intro to Comparative before taking European Politics, there are chapters in this Caramani text that they can read outside of class to catch up on the terms and theories they are missing.There is very little coverage of the world outside of Western Europe. This is fine for my class since it is focused on the region of Europe. For introductory comparative politics courses, I prefer Essentials of Comparative Politics by O'Neil and the Essential Readings of Comparative Politics by O'Neil and Rogowski.

I assigned this to students in a course I teach. Big mistake. The presentation is simply not accessible to novices. It functions better as a reference for professors seeking literature reviews, sources, and material from which to develop lectures. It is comprehensive and up-to-date, but it doesn't explain key concepts well, and so it's generally over the heads of my students.

My son needed this book for his college class. They used a 3rd party to ship it and it took much longer then we anticipated.

I got the book within a week and the description was true to its word.

Book was nearly in perfect condition - one page had blue dye over it but other than that, I'm pretty happy. Content looks okay so far, will find out as the course starts if it has lived up to expectations