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A guide to political sociology: its theories, the media, the state, parties, civil society, citizenship, and politics under globalization.
List of contents
Introduction. New directions in political sociology; Part I. Theories of Political Sociology: 1. Power; 2. Class, elite and conflict theories; 3. The promise of field theory for the study of political institutions; 4. Culture in politics and politics in culture: institutions, practices and boundaries; 5. Political sociology and the post-colonial perspective; 6. Gender, state, and citizenship: challenges and dilemmas in feminist theorizing; 7. Theories of race, ethnicity, and the racial state; 8. The convergence of culture and political economy? Bourdieu, Mann and institutional theory; 9. Tasks of political sociology in the next ten years; Part II. Media Explosion, Knowledge as Power, and Demographic Reversals: 10. 'Old' media, 'New' media, hybrid media, and the changing character of political participation; 11. Information gathering, quantification, influence, reactivity and power; 12. The light and dark sides of big data, web scraping and data harmonization; 13. States, politics, and expertise; 14. Towards a political sociology of demography; Part III. The State and its Political Organizations: 15. The political economy of the capitalist state; 16. States as institutions; 17. Nation-state formation: power and culture; 18. The political sociology of public finance and the fiscal sociology of politics; 19. Politics, institutions and the carceral state; 20. State transitions to democracy; 21. Revolutions against the state; Part IV. Civil Society: The Roots and Processes of Political Action: 22. The challenges of citizenship in civil society; 23. Social movements; 24. Political parties: from reflection to articulation and beyond; 25. Machine politics and clientelism; 26. The good, the bland and the ugly: volunteering and civic associations in political sociology; 27. The politics of economic crisis: from voter retreat to the rise of new populisms; 28. Public opinion and its impact on politics, voting and civil society; 29. On the move: nationalism between left and right, and spreading into China; Part V. Established and New State Policies and Innovations: 30. The evolution of fiscal and monetary policy; 31. Welfare state policies and their effects; 32. Sexuality, gender, and social policy; 33. Immigration, asylum, integration and citizenship policy; 34. Cosmopolitanism and political sociology: world citizenship, global governance, and human rights; 35. War, terrorism and securitization while preserving democratic rights; Part VI. Globalization and New and Bigger Sources of Power and Resistance: 36. Global political sociology and world-systems; 37. Liberalizing trade and finance: corporate class agency and the neoliberal era; 38. The racial state in and beyond the age of racial formation theory; 39. Democracy and autocracy in the age of populism; 40. Transnational movements.
Summary
The New Handbook of Political Sociology provides a survey of the vibrant field of political sociology in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics.
