ABSTRACT
Comparative politics as a field in political science has had a long and glorious history. Rational choice has gained less acceptance among comparative politics scholars than in other areas of political science. The field of comparative politics has clearly become more fragmented since the 1960s. Dependency theory was a product of the self-same disillusionment with developmentalism as was the corporatism approach. Corporatism, in both its sociological-political-cultural and institutional variations, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an alternative to developmentalism. State-society relations focuses on many of the same arenas of politics as does the corporatist approach: the relations of organized labor to the state, of business to the state, of peasants to the state, of militaries and religious groups to the state, and of universities to the state. The political economy approach is used for a wide variety of research purposes largely devoid of manifest ideological posturing.
