The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? This Oxford Handbook examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on essays from the world's leading scholars of political behavior research. The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new responsibilities for the citizenry. These political changes are paralleled by tremendous advances in our empirical knowledge of citizens and their behaviors through the institutionalization of systematic, comparative study of contemporary publics--ranging from the advanced industrial democracies to the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to new survey research on the developing world. These essays describe how citizens think about politics, how their values shape their behavior, the patterns of participation, the sources of vote choice, and how public opinion impacts on governing and public policy. This is the most comprehensive review of the cross-national literature of citizen behavior and the relationship between citizens and their governments. It will become the first point of reference for scholars and students interested in these key issues.

In the writing of prefaces for works of this sort, most editors report being faced with similar challenges and have much in common in relating how these challenges are met. They acknowledge that their paramount ob jective is to provide more than an overview of topics but rather to offer selective critical reviews that will serve to advance theory and research in the particular area reviewed. The question of the appropriate audience to be addressed is usually answered by directing material to a potential audience of social scientists, graduate students, and, occasionally, ad vanced undergraduate students. Editors who are confronted with the problem of structuring their material often explore various means by which their social science discipline might be subdivided, then generally conclude that no particular classification strategy is superior. In elabo rating on the process by which the enterprise was initiated, editors typ ically resort to a panel of luminaries, who provide independent support for the idea and then offer both suggestions for topics and the authors who will write them. Editors usually concede that chapter topics and content do not reflect their original conception but are a compromise between their wishes and the authors' expertise and capabilities. Editors report that inevitable delays occur, authors drop out of projects and are replaced, and new topics are introduced. Finally, editors frequently con fess that the final product is incomplete, with gaps occurring because of failed commitments by authors or because authors could not be secured to write certain chapters.

The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior explores the intersection of psychology, political science, sociology, and human behavior. This encyclopedia integrates theories, research, and case studies from a variety of disciplines that inform this established area of study.

On Revolutions That Never Were "If you want to understand what a science is," the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 5) has written, "you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do. " If it is not always possible to follow this instruction, it is because the rate of change in scientific work is rapid and the growth of publications reporting on this work is great. It is therefore the task of a handbook, like this Hand book of Political Behavior, to summarize and evaluate what the practi tioners report. But it is always prudent to keep in mind that a handbook is only a shortcut and that there is no substitute for looking directly at what the practitioners of a science do. For when scientists are "at work" (Walter, 1971), the image of what they are doing is often quite different from that conveyed in the "briefs" that, in their own way, make a hand book so valuable that we cannot do without it. These reflections set the stage.

The Handbook of Electoral Behaviour is an authoritative and wide ranging survey of this dynamic field, drawing together a team of the world′s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study.