Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics

There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems. This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria: 1. In every case, a model of human behavior or institutional impact is specified; 2. Also in every case, this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether this model is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.

Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It intends to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics.
There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems.
This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria:

• In every case, a model of human behavior or institutional impact is specified;
• Also in every case, this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether this model is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.

Booknews

A dozen articles analyze the political systems of ten countries, integrating mainstream comparative political science with concepts of public choice to provide a view of public choice at the level of nations rather than systems. Each case specifies a model of human behavior or institutional impact, and each model is confronted with data appropriate to evaluating whether it is useful for understanding politics in one or more countries. Some of the topics are voters' party preferences in multiparty systems and their coalitional and spatial implications in Germany after unification, issue competition in the 1993 Norwegian national election, and retrospective and prospective voting in a democracy dominated by one party in Taiwan's 1996 presidential election. Reprinted from vol. 97, no. 3 (1998). No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)