Practicing what we Preach

Abstract

The revolution in the nature and purposes of comparative politics, to which we were exhorted by Macridis and others in the early 1950s, implied a more comparative and sociological orientation in our teaching and research. By taking a survey of textbooks used in the field and a mail survey of university teachers of comparative politics courses, the author collected data on the teaching enterprise to complement data on research activities. These data show that a majority of the textbooks reflect the revolution in comparative politics in some way but around one-third do not and that 40% of the courses are taught in a country-by-country format. Hence, despite the widespread espousal of its aims, in teaching and textbooks the “revolution” is far from complete, and there may be a slight retrenchment toward more traditional approaches.