The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology

A comprehensive handbook that attempts to cover the whole field of topics that a reader interested primarily in actual politics needs to understand. This would include some literatures that flourish primarily outside of sociology (and particularly outside of American sociology) as well as some topics, such as clientelism and community power, that have become less active research topics but which nevertheless are important parts of a comprehensive overview of political life in its social aspects. The book we propose will be a somewhat longer than standard length Handbook, with around forty authors of contributions under 10,000 words each, and a bibliography.

The audience for this book would be students and scholars, but the primary purpose of the book would be to provide essential conceptual and empirical background to the social study of politics. One of the oddities of this field is that many of the texts that are still taught to students, such as Lipset’s Political Man, are quite old, and based on research done in the fifties. Even in the research literature, it is common to find references to works like Bachrach and Baratz’s Two Faces of Power of 1962. The journal literature in political sociology narrowly understood, however, while it is very sophisticated, tends to be self-referential and inaccessible to outsiders, and to be selective in the actual political topics it addresses.