The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis: A Portrait of Contemporary Debates (Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation)

This is the first volume to provide an overview of the role of ideas in political analysis, and as such offers a much-needed collection for a large number of courses on political analysis, broadly conceived, whilst also making a valuable theoretical and empirical contribution to the existing literature. The authors make a timely intervention as the discipline of political analysis displays more and more signs of ideational intrusion. Despite the proliferation of ideational accounts in the last decade or so, the debate remains a curious disciplinary movement of essentially contested concepts and obtuse meanings that can be better described as a diverse collection of followers who are neither united in intent, similar in focus or method, nor canonized in terms of theoretical precision. This collection takes stock of this current wave of scholarship, making sense of the ideational movement and infers which of its many strands might prove more useful to political analysis. By providing a balanced account between theoretical and empirical contributions, The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis fills a gap in the literature and ignites further exploration of theoretical and empirical work on ideational phenomena.Gofas, Andreas is the author of 'The Role of Ideas in Political Analysis: A Portrait of Contemporary Debates (Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation)', published 2009 under ISBN 9780415391566 and ISBN 0415391563.