Comparative Government and Politics

Citation

McCormick, J., Hague, R., & Harrop, M. (2025). Comparative Government and Politics (13th ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.

Chapter Summary

The thirteenth edition has eighteen chapters in three parts, running to about 528 pages. The parts move from the basic ideas of the field, through the institutions of government, to the processes that connect citizens and states. The publisher says the edition gives increased attention to democratic reversal and declining trust and adds new and extended coverage of LGBTQ+ issues, identity politics and populism, together with updated country spotlights.

Part 1: Principles (Chapters 1–6)

• Chapter 1: Government and politics. Opens the subject by defining what government and politics are and why they are studied.
• Chapter 2: Making comparisons. Turns to method: how political systems are compared and what comparison can show.
• Chapter 3: States and nations. Covers the state as the basic unit of comparison and its relationship to nations.
• Chapter 4: Political culture. Looks at the attitudes and values of a population toward its polity.
• Chapter 5: Democratic rule. Sets out how democratic regimes work, and the publisher's emphasis on democratic reversal sits naturally alongside it.
• Chapter 6: Authoritarian rule. Treats non-democratic regimes, completing the contrast with the preceding chapter. Together, Chapters 5 and 6 give the markers of authoritarian and democratic states and those that fall between.

Part 2: Institutions (Chapters 7–12)

• Chapter 7: Constitutions and courts. Presents the legal framework of the state and the judicial bodies that interpret it.
• Chapter 8: Executives. Deals with the branch of government that runs the state.
• Chapter 9: Legislatures. Deals with the law-making and representative bodies.
• Chapter 10: Bureaucracies. Treats the administrative machinery that carries out policy.
• Chapter 11: Sub-national government. Moves below the national level to regional and local government.
• Chapter 12: The Media. Closes the part with the media as an institution within political life.

Part 3: Processes (Chapters 13–18)

• Chapter 13: Political participation. Starts the part with the ways citizens take part in politics.
• Chapter 14: Elections. Covers how citizens choose their governments.
• Chapter 15: Political parties. Treats parties as the organisations that contest elections and organise government.
• Chapter 16: Interest groups. Treats groups that seek to influence government outside party competition.
• Chapter 17: Public policy. Turns to how governments make and carry out policy.
• Chapter 18: Political economy. Closes the book with the relationship between politics and the economy.

Key Concepts

Part 1: Principles

• Political culture: the attitudes and values a population holds toward politics.
• Democratic and authoritarian rule: the two regime types set against each other, with the space between them.
• States and nations: the units around which comparison is organised.

Part 2: Institutions

• Constitutions and courts: the legal structure of a political system.
• Executives, legislatures and bureaucracies: the main organs of government.
• Sub-national government: authority below the national level.

Part 3: Processes

• Participation, elections, parties and interest groups: the channels linking citizens to government.
• Public policy and political economy: what governments do and how that connects to economic life.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Thematic organisation. The contents are arranged by topic (executives, legislatures, parties, elections) and not country by country, so a reader can follow one institution across many systems.
• Clear three-part design. Principles, institutions and processes give a course a ready-made sequence, and the chapter list is easy to match to a course calendar.
• Aids for students. The publisher lists maps, diagrams, tables, discussion questions and further-reading suggestions, and a companion site with a flashcard glossary, a guide to researching comparative politics and a map of country spotlights.
• Coverage across regime types. The publisher says the book explains both democratic and authoritarian regimes, on the domestic stage and internationally, with country spotlights that show the changing state of democracy.
• Currency. The thirteenth edition (2025) is recent, and its revisions address democratic reversal, trust, identity politics and populism.

Limitations

• Breadth over depth. With eighteen chapters in about 528 pages, each topic receives a short treatment. A student who wants an argument or a research design will need further reading beyond what the book supplies.
• Not a methods or theory text. Only one chapter (Chapter 2) is given to comparison as method, so readers wanting a systematic account of causal inference or formal models will need a different book.
• Edition dependence. Chapter order and the country spotlights change between editions, so page references from earlier editions do not carry over.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the broadest and most general starting point among the comparative politics books on the list. It is for a reader with no prior study of politics who needs a map of the field and of the world's political systems before reading more specialised works.

Patrick O'Neil's Essentials of Comparative Politics is a concise concept-led alternative. Caramani's edited Comparative Politics gives chapter-by-chapter specialist treatments at a higher level. Clark, Golder and Golder's Principles of Comparative Politics builds the subject around explicit theory and evidence and suits a student who wants the scientific method and game theory. Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy and Tsebelis's Veto Players are specialised studies of democratic institutions to read after a general text such as this one.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes no previous study of politics and suits first- and second-year students in comparative politics, comparative government, introduction to politics or political science.

A practical plan:

• Core: Part 1 first, especially Chapters 2, 5 and 6, which supply the vocabulary used everywhere else.
• Then: Part 2 for institutions. Read Chapters 7–10 as a group, then Chapters 11 and 12 as needed.
• Part 3: Chapters 13–15 form a sequence from participation to elections to parties; Chapters 16–18 can be taken in any order depending on the course.
• Alongside: use the discussion questions and further-reading suggestions the publisher lists, keep the country spotlights in view when comparing regimes, and use the companion site's glossary and research guide.