ABSTRACT
All political decisions are made at one level of government or another, sometimes even by several at the same time. Consequently, the level of analysis is one of the classic issues in the study of politics because it poses an eternal question: Should the focus of political analysis be the individual political actor (a lone citizen or organization), a local government (a municipality, county, or special district), a national government, or the international political system as a whole? The forces at play and the links within and between these levels make single-level analysis problematic at best. So there is really no point in undertaking a political analysis of a political actor in isolation—because that actor is never in isolation. He or she is always a citizen of a state and/or a member of other large groups, and there are always a large number of links and interactions among the various levels of government and other social groupings.
