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Uncomfortable with a strictly thematic approach, or tired of a purely country-by-country organization for your comparative politics course? Teach the way you want to teach with this innovative hybrid book - fully accessible to students, easy to teach, and satisfying to professors who want to give students a real sense of the questions that drive research in the field. Organized thematically around important concepts in comparative politics - Who rules? What explains political behavior? Where and why? - the book integrates a set of extended case studies in eleven "core" countries. Serving as consistent geographic touchstones, the cases are set in chapters where they make the most sense substantively - not separated from theory or in a separate volume - and vividly illustrate issues in cross-national context. Features include: * Core country case studies: Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, India, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, the UK, the U.S., and, new to this edition, Mexico. * NEW! Methods in Context boxes that model how comparativists do their research and analysis. * In Context fact boxes that put eye-opening data into thematic context. * Where and Why? boxes that explore why certain political outcomes occur in some countries but not in others. * Country and Concept tables that display key indicators for core countries. Updates and revisions include: * recent elections around the world and the effects of the global financial crisis and its aftermath, * authoritarian versus totalitarian regimes, * ethnic violence, * racial politics and identity, * economic globalization, * executive-legislative institutions, and * the role of civil society in government.