The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in this Handbook has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behaviour. It shows that context matters in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. The Handbook, written by scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account. It is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.