When they assess competing theories political scientists typically rely exclusively and naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are...

The gradual emergence of the idea of culture is traced from the writings of Comte to those of Durkheim, Weber and Parsons, from whom Almond and Verba derived the concept of political culture. The idea of culture emerged as a response to a problem raised by Comte around 1830: how the social...

The article discusses Stein Rokkan's research strategy, i.e. that of retrospectively explaining structural variations, in the light of the crucial problem of modern social science, namely: how to reconcile the sociology of structures and the sociology of action. The authors' hypothesis is that...

Contemporary Western political culture is characterized by three achievements and ideas: (1) the limitation of government or the rule of law; (2) some institutional separation of the economy and of science from government and religion; and (3) popular participation or democracy. The first two...

The primary purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative, grid-group theory, to the conventional liberal-conservative continuum for understanding the structure of mass belief systems. We also examine the potential advantages of this alternative in explaining preference formation with a...

Our conceptions of politics ought to: (a) help clarify our normative interests in politics; (b) encompass everyday understandings of politics; and (c) define the domain of politics in ways that serve explanation. Events in the last couple of decades - from the rise of new social movements to the...