Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Alfred Stepan is Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University. In his career he has also been Gladstone Professor of Government at Oxford University, the first Rector of Central European University, and the Director of Graduate Studies in Political Science at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy.It is quite useful to find so much interesting material concentrated in a single volume. There are, however, two substantive issues on which Stephan breaks new ground and which promise substantial future edifices: 1) the impact of world religious systems upon democracy; and 2) the prospects for federalism as a solution to political order in multinational democracies.
Government and Opposition
One is constantly reminded when reading these chapters of how much richer comparative work can be when it is not just an abstract method of research but also possesses a component of human interaction built into the very processes of conceptualizing a problem and writing up the final results.
Government and Opposition
There is something for almost everyone who enjoys arguing about politics and wonders why human beings have invented so many ways of practising and justifying this activity.
Government and Opposition
The book is impressive in its empirical range. In what is a convincing argument for comparative politics, it covers virtually all corners of the world, from the established liberal democracies in the West to democratizing or consolidating democracies in Latin America and eastern Europe. In addition, Stepan's essays stand out for the bridges they construct between the empirical and theoretical debates. Whether focusing on political identities or institutions, or on the power of the state versus society, Stepan reveals an extraordinary capacity for selecting the problems relevant to contemporary democracies and arriving at agenda-setting findings ... an invaluable collection of essays.
Democratization
A striking demonstration of Alfred Stepan's remarkable combination of analytic range and his career-long commitment to extracting novel insights through interviews with key actors. Big questions, fruitful comparisons, and agenda-setting findings.
David Collier, University of California, Berkeley