ABSTRACT
Comparative politics as a field in political science has had a long and glorious history. This chapter shows that the new diversity and pluralism of approaches in comparative politics is healthy and invigorating. The political economy approach at times suffers from many of the same ideological hangups as does dependency theory in that for a long time in most US colleges and universities it was associated with Left or Marxian analyses. The chapter summarizes the public policy approach was also popular because public policy analysis was often associated with neutral "good government" movements and was seen as less ideologically freighted than some of the other approaches. And, as is obvious, the public policy approach often overlapped with some political economy analyses as well as with corporatism, developmentalist, and state-society relations. Public policy analyses can take a variety of forms; here it is important to distinguish between developed and developing nations.
