Customer Reviews

Democratization (Democracy--from Classical Times to the Present, 2)

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A big problem with many introductory comparative politics texts is their rather limited nature. In focusing on basic institutional differences between the world's various sovereign states, books that tend to focus the relative merits of, say, presidential versus parliamentary systems don't often provide much context or comparative analysis. Students get from these books a good sense of how the world's western democracies work, but no real sense of how scholars explain how they got there or how they compare with non-democratic political systems.

I like Potter et al's Democratization because it provides the context and detail other texts leave out in an accesible, easy-to-read format. It's a great book that I think is a good text for any intro to comparative politics class or even an advanced high school social studies class.