The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior

The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior

Edited by : Russell J. Dalton

Release date: Jan 2007

Oxford University Press

Number of pages: 992

ISBN: 9780199270125


Description

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines.

What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? This Oxford Handbook examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on essays from the world's leading scholars of political behavior research. The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new responsibilities for the citizenry. These political changes are paralleled by tremendous advances in our empirical knowledge of citizens and their behaviors through the institutionalization of systematic, comparative study of contemporary publics--ranging from the advanced industrial democracies to the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to new survey research on the developing world. These essays describe how citizens think about politics, how their values shape their behavior, the patterns of participation, the sources of vote choice, and how public opinion impacts on governing and public policy.

This is the most comprehensive review of the cross-national literature of citizen behavior and the relationship between citizens and their governments. It will become the first point of reference for scholars and students interested in these key issues.
 

Features

  • Oxford Handbooks of Political Science are the essential guide to the state of political science today
  • The only fully comprehensive ten-volume survey of the whole discipline
  • Not just a review of the discipline, but a major contribution to it
  • The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior has an innovative structure, responding to the very latest scholarship in political behavior, with sections covering: Mass belief systems and communication, modernization and social change, political values, new debates in political behavior, political participation, does public opinion matter?, the methodology of comparative political behavior research
  • The volume covers and critiques all the key approaches to political behavior from the detached observer to the engaged practitioner
  • Engagingly written by an illustrious team of international contributors

Reviews

"The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior provides important coverage of one of the major areas of political science research. It brings together the leading authors in the field and it takes a very broad view of what is a complex and multi-dimensional subject matter. Students entering political science and scholars pursuing the subject will benefit from this volume."--Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University