From the Back Cover
Longman Classics in Political Science
In revising classic works in political science, Longman celebrates the contributions its authors and their research have made to the discipline. The Longman Classics in Political Science series honors these authors and their work. Providing students with an updated context, each title in the series includes a new foreword, written by one of today’s top scholars, offering a fresh, in-depth analysis of the book and its enduring contributions.
Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability
Alvin Rabushka
Kenneth A. Shepsle
This landmark study in the field of comparative politics is being celebrated for its return to print as the newest addition to the Longman Classics in Political Science series. Politics in Plural Societies presents a model of political competition in multiethnic societies and explains why plural societies, and the struggle for power within them, often erupt with interethnic hostility.
Distinguished scholars Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth A. Shepsle collaborate in this reissue of their classic work to demonstrate–in a new epilogue–the pertinence of the arguments and evidence offered when the book was originally published. They apply this thesis to the multiethnic politics of countries that are of great interest today: Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, and more.
Features
- Develops and tests a formal model of political cooperation and conflict in multiethnic societies.
- Offers comparisons amongst 18 countries based on theoretically developed categories, rather than by region of the world.
- Brings formal theory together with sound empirical analysis, directly comparing the predictions of theory with the evidence of real-world politics.
- Examines the problems of orderly government in multiethnic societies and the difficulties in implementing solutions.
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--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Alvin Rabushka is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University. His principle work focuses on tax policy. He is co-author, with Robert E. Hall, of The Flat Tax, 2nd edition (Hoover Press, 1995). His work on the flat tax has provided the inspiration for the introduction of numerous flat-tax bills in the U.S. Congress and the adoption of the flat tax in more than a dozen countries, largely in Central and Eastern Europe, since 1994.
Kenneth A. Shepsle is the George D. Markham Professor of Government and a founding member of The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. Professor Shepsle has written numerous articles on formal political theory, congressional and parliamentary politics, public policy, and political economy. He was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was editor of Public Choice, and served as Vice President of the American Political Science Association. In 1990 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, 1995-98. His current research focuses on formal models of political institutions and intergenerational politics.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
