Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis

Robert Edward Goodin, Charles Tilly

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2006 - Political Science - 869 pages

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. This volume, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, or universal laws of human behavior. It shows that "context matters" in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account.

Contents

• It Depends: 3
• Why and How Philosophy Matters: 35
• The Socialization of Epistemology: 58
• Political Ontology: 78
• Mind Will and Choice: 97
• Theory Fact and Logic: 114
• Why and How Psychology Matters: 131
• Motivation and Emotion: 157
• Social Preferences Homo Economicus and Zoon Politikon: 172
• Frames and Their Consequences: 187
• Memory Individual and Collective: 210
• Why and How Ideas Matter: 227
• Detecting Ideas and Their Effects: 252
• How Previous Ideas Affect Later Ideas: 266
• How Ideas Affect Actions: 284
• Mistaken Ideas and Their Effects: 297
• Why and How Culture Matters: 319
• How to Detect Culture and Its Effects: 341
• Race Ethnicity Religion: 360
• Language Its Stakes and Its Effects: 376
• The Idea of Political Culture: 392
• Why and How History Matters: 417
• Historical Knowledge and Evidence: 438
• Historical Context and Path Dependence: 454
• Does History Repeat?: 472
• The Present as History: 490
• Why and How Place Matters: 509
• Detecting the Significance of Place: 534
• Space Place and Time: 547
• Spaces and Places as Sites and Objects of Politics: 564
• Uses of Local Knowledge: 579
• Why and How Population Matters: 597
• The Politics of Demography: 619
• Politics and Mass Immigration: 636
• Population Change Urbanization and Political Consolidation: 649
• Population Composition as an Object of Political Struggle: 664
• Why and How Technology Matters: 681
• The Gender Politics of Technology: 707
• Military Technologies and Politics: 722
• Technology as a Site and Object of Politics: 745
• Who Says Whats Rational When: 767
• The Behavioral Revolution and the Remaking: 797
• Index: 806

About the author

Robert E. Goodin is at Professor of Philosophy and Social and Political Theory at the Australian National University. Charles Tilly is at Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis; Oxford handbooks; The Oxford handbooks of political science
• Editors: Robert Edward Goodin, Charles Tilly
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online, 2006
• ISBN: 0199270430, 9780199270439
• Length: 869 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / History & Theory