ISBN: 978-1-60426-611-5

Format: Print Paperback

Retail Price: $106.00

Price to Bookstores: $84.80

Key updates include: an expanded introduction that situates European politics within a comparative framework; more substantive discussions in the "Future of..." chapters; the latest in European politics, including the election in Britain, the aftermath of the deaths of Polish government leaders, the financial crisis affecting Greece and other European countries, and more; updates of key social and political issues including immigration, gender, religion, civic society, and trans-Atlantic relations; and up-to-date tables and figures with key cross-national data.

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Each Part contains the following chapters:
The Context of Politics
Where Is the Power?
Who Has the Power?
How Is Power Used?
What Is the Future of Politics?

Introduction: The What, Why, and How of Comparative Politics
I. The United Kingdom, B. Guy Peters and Christopher J. Carman
II. France, William Safran
III. Germany, David P. Conradt
IV. Italy, Raffaella Y. Nanetti
V. Sweden, M. Donald Hancock
VI. Russia, Stephen White
VII. Poland, Marjorie Castle
VIII. The European Union, M. Donald Hancock

With its thorough and systematic analyses of politics in the major European countries, this textbook works great in introductory courses. Besides explaining institutional rules and structures, the authors, who are all long-standing country experts, usefully examine how governmental decisions are actually made and what goals public policy-makers have pursued and accomplished.

- Kurt Weyland, University of Texas at Austin

Politics in Europe offers enough depth to introduce students to European countries individually and in their unique contexts while structuring chapter discussion uniformly and systematically to facilitate cross-country comparisons. This balance is difficult to find, based on my experience with other available texts on European politics.

- Michelle Williams, University of West Florida

The knowledge in the United States about Europe and vice versa is diminishing; therefore a book like Politics in Europe. is all the more important. Its updated fifth edition provides a brilliant and highly readable analysis of Europe’s major players. The book is an excellent overview of politics in Europe with its broad scope, in-depth coverage and cross-national comparison. It enables the reader to gain a thorough understanding of the context of European national politics: the political framework, the decision-making, the role of political parties and the uses of political power in each country.

- Dietmar Herz, University of Erfurt

M. Donald Hancock is professor emeritus of political science at Vanderbilt University. He has previously taught at Columbia University, the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and the Universities of Bielefeld and Mannheim in Germany. Hancock is the founding director of two centers for European Studies—the first at UT Austin and the second, founded in 1981, at Vanderbilt. The latter is now designated the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies (which Hancock has also served as associate director for outreach activities). He is the coauthor (with Henry Krisch) of Politics in Germany (2009), and co-editor and coauthor of Transitions to Capitalism and Democracy in Russia and Central Europe (2000), German Unification: Process and Outcomes (1994), and Managing Modern Capitalism: Industrial Renewal and Workplace Democracy in the United States and Western Europe (1991). Hancock has served as cochair of the Council for European Studies and as president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies and the Conference Group on German Politics. He is currently working on a collaborative study of energy, societal, and military security in the Baltic region.

Christopher J. Carman is the John Anderson Senior Research Lecturer in politics at the University of Strathclyde. He previously taught at Glasgow, Pittsburgh, and Rice Universities. His research specializes in the behavioral and institutional aspects of political representation. He is a co-author of the forthcoming books, Elections and Voters in Britain (2011), with David Denver and Robert Johns, and Of Conscience and Constituents: Religiosity and the Political Psychology of Representation in America (2011) with David Barker. He has also published a variety of articles on British, Scottish and American politics as well as conducted evaluations of the Scotland’s Public Petitions System for the Scottish Parliament.

Marjorie Castle is the author of two books on Polish politics: Triggering Communism's Collapse: Perceptions and Power in Poland's Transition (2003) and Democracy in Poland (2002), coauthored with Ray Taras. She teaches political science at the University of Utah.

B. Guy Peters is the Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University of Pittsburgh and also Professor of Comparative Governance at Zeppelin University (Germany). He has held numerous visiting and honorary teaching positions at institutions across the United States and around the world. His recent books include Specialization and Coordination in Seven Industrial Democracies (with Geert Bockaert and Koen Verhoest) and Tradition and Administration, co-edited with Martin Painter. He is also co-editor of the European Political Science Review.

David P. Conradt is professor of political science at East Carolina University. He has also held joint appointments at universities in Konstanz, Cologne, and Dresden in Germany. Among his recent publications are “The Shrinking Elephants: The 2009 Election and the Changing Party System,” German Politics and Society (Fall 2010), The German Polity (2009), A Precarious Victory: Schröder and the German Elections of 2002 (2005), and Power Shift in Germany: The 1998 Election and the End of the Kohl Era (2000). He has also published a variety of articles and monographs on German political culture, parties, and elections.

William Safran is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has also taught at City University of New York and at the Universities of Grenoble and Bordeaux in France. He has written numerous articles on French and European politics. His recent books include The French Polity, 7th ed. (2009); Language, Ethnic Identity, and the State (2005); and The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion, and Politics (2002). He is the founding editor of the journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Stephen White is James Bryce Professor of Politics at the University of Glasgow, and also Adjunct Professor of European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Applied Politics in Moscow. He was president of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies from 1994-1997 and is chief editor of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. His recent publications include Putin's Russia and the Enlarged Europe (with Roy Allison and Margot Light, 2006), Developments in Russian Politics 7 (coedited, 2010), and Understanding Russian Politics (2011). He is currently working on the implications of EU and NATO enlargement for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and on changes in the political elite over the Putin and Medvedev presidencies.

Raffaella Y. Nanetti is professor of urban planning and policy (UPP) in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, having served as the UPP director in the 1990s at the time of the creation of the new College. She was a member, with Robert D. Putnam and Robert Leonardi, of the study team that carried out the twenty-year longitudinal study of Italian regional and local institutions from which the concept of “social capital” was empirically derived (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, 1992). Since the mid-1990s she has worked on the application of the concept of social capital to the field of urban planning, focusing on social capital–building strategies to improve institutional performance and to promote and sustain local and regional development.

Instructor's Resources:

Downloadable graphics from the book are available for use while lecturing or in discussion groups. You can download the entire set as PDFs, JPEGs, or PowerPoint slides

http://college.cqpress.com/sites/hancockir/home.aspx