Some Major Works in Comparative Politics
- Aristotle
- In his work The Politics, Aristotle compares different "constitutions", by introducing a famous typology based on two criteria: the number of rulers (one, few, many) and the nature of the political regime (good or corrupt). Thus he distinguishes six different kinds of "constitutions": monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (good types), versus tyranny, oligarchy and democracy (corrupt types).
- Montesquieu
- The Spirit of the Laws
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution
- James C. Scott
- The Art of Not Being Governed
- Seymour Martin Lipset
- Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics
- Barrington Moore
- In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) Moore compares revolutions in countries like England, Russia and Japan (among others). His thesis is that mass-led revolutions dispossess the landed elite and result in Communism, and that revolutions by the elite result in Fascism. It is thus only revolutions by the bourgeoisie that result in democratic governance. For the outlier case of India, practices of the Mogul Empire, British Imperial rule and the Caste System are cited.
- Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba
- In their work, The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba embark on the first major cross-national survey of attitudes to determine the role of political culture in maintaining the stability of democratic regimes.
- Samuel P. Huntington
- The Third Wave and Political Order in Changing Societies
- Robert A. Dahl
- Polyarchy
- Arend Lijphart
- Patterns of Democracy (1999), a comprehensive study of democracies around the world.
- Seymour M. Lipset
- Political man (1960)
- Giovanni Sartori
- Parties and party systems
- Joel Migdal
- Strong Societies and Weak States.
- Theda Skocpol
- In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China Theda Skocpol compares the major revolutions of France, Russia and China: three basically similar events which took place in three very different contexts. Skopcol's purpose is to find possible similarities which might help explain the phenomenon of political revolution. From this point of view, this work represents a good example of a research conducted according to the Most Different Systems Design.
- Robert D. Putnam
- Making Democracy Work (1993), a major work assessing why some democratic governments work and other fail, based on the study of the Italian regional governments.
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—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
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