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Bottom Up Comparative Politics: Game Theory Abroad

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Ruth Lane
Ruth Lane
Affiliation:
American University
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Extract

If comparative politics is in one if its periodic states of theoretical collapse (Blyth 2006, 493), no one feels the lack of roof and walls more acutely than instructors in undergraduate comparative politics classes. With professional colleagues and graduate students one preaches to the choir, but with college students, many of whom may be non-majors, we must work in partibus infidelium, among those who have not yet been converted. Without an orthodox doctrine to work from, this can be a challenging task indeed. The approach used here, combining detailed socio-political narratives with strong analytic theory, tends to engage students because it fills in a full range of national life, rich in national eccentricities, cultural exaggerations, and hidden motives, and because it controls the proliferation of detail by emphasizing its logic. In a sense the abstract becomes concrete and the concrete becomes abstract.

Type
The Teacher
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 871 - 877
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2008

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