ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly examines comparative politics as a field in the study of politics and political science. It reviews the issues of theory in comparative inquiry and describes the evolution of the field in five theoretical directions. The study of comparative politics has evoked much confusion for student and scholar alike. Theoretical and methodological problems of comparative politics were of concern to Maurice Duverger (1964), who offered an introduction that is useful to the reader. The cultural thrust in comparative politics, conspicuously prominent during the 1960s, emanated from traditional work on culture in anthropology, socialization and small group studies in sociology, and personality studies in psychology. Sometime during the mid-1960s, the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC's) Committee on Comparative Politics decided to direct attention to studies of elites. The chapter also provides an outline of this book.
