Uncomfortable with a strictly thematic approach, or tired of a purely country-by-country organization for your comparative politics course?

Teach the way you want to teach with this innovative hybrid book - fully accessible to students, easy to teach, and satisfying to professors who want to give students a real sense of the questions that drive research in the field. Organized thematically around important concepts in comparative politics - Who rules? What explains political behavior? Where and why? - the book integrates a set of extended case studies in eleven "core" countries. Serving as consistent geographic touchstones, the cases are set in chapters where they make the most sense substantively - not separated from theory or in a separate volume - and vividly illustrate issues in cross-national context.

Features include:

• Core country case studies: Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, India, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, the UK, the U.S., and, new to this edition, Mexico.

• NEW! Methods in Context boxes that model how comparativists do their research and analysis.

• In Context fact boxes that put eye-opening data into thematic context.

• Where and Why? boxes that explore why certain political outcomes occur in some countries but not in others.

• Country and Concept tables that display key indicators for core countries.

Updates and revisions include:

• recent elections around the world and the effects of the global financial crisis and its aftermath,

• authoritarian versus totalitarian regimes,

• ethnic violence,

• racial politics and identity,

• economic globalization,

• executive-legislative institutions, and

• the role of civil society in government.