Theorizing in Comparative Politics

Goran Hyden is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida. Theorizing in Comparative Politics is the result of sixty years of research and teaching shared between East Africa and Florida. Earlier iterations of the work include Political Development in Rural Tanzania (1969), No Shortcuts to Progress (1983), and African Politics in Comparative Perspective (2006).

• 1. Three theoretical spurts; 2. How history matters; 3. Relevance of social formations; 4. Nation-states and state-nations; 5. Regimes and institutions; 6. Parties and ideology; 7. Culture and the public sphere; 8. Four neighbours, four regimes; 9. What Africa teaches us.

'Hyden brings six decades of wide-ranging research, teaching, and reflection on African politics to this new volume. He revisits the first wave of political development research in the 1960s and connects this to the study of democratization in the 1990s and 2000s. Hyden reworks several leitmotifs of his most impactful contributions to the field, questioning the inevitability of democracy in the Western mould and calling for new ways of conceptualizing political development in African countries. A reflective and humane account.' Catherine Boone, Professor of Comparative Politics, London School of Economics