Comparative politics in the context of "Juan Linz"

International relations (IR, and also referred to as international studies, international politics, or international affairs) is an academic discipline. In a broader sense, the study of IR, in addition to multilateral relations, concerns all activities among states—such as war, diplomacy, trade, and foreign policy—as well as relations with and among other international actors, such as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), international legal bodies, and multinational corporations (MNCs).

International relations is generally classified as a major multidiscipline of political science, along with comparative politics, political methodology, political theory, and public administration. It often draws heavily from other fields, including anthropology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, and sociology. There are several schools of thought within IR, of which the most prominent are realism, liberalism, and constructivism.

Democracy indices are quantitative and comparative assessments of the state of democracy for different countries according to various definitions of democracy.

The democracy indices differ in whether they are categorical, such as classifying countries into democracies, hybrid regimes, and autocracies, or continuous values. The qualitative nature of democracy indices enables data analytical approaches for studying causal mechanisms of regime transformation processes.

Global politics, also known as world politics, names both the discipline that studies the political and economic patterns of the world and the field that is being studied. At the centre of that field are the different processes of political globalization in relation to questions of social power.

The discipline studies the relationships between cities, nation-states, shell-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations and international organizations. Current areas of discussion include national and ethnic conflict regulation, democracy and the politics of national self-determination, globalization and its relationship to democracy, conflict and peace studies, comparative politics, political economy, and the international political economy of the environment. One important area of global politics is contestation in the global political sphere over legitimacy.

Jeffrey I. Herbst is an American political scientist, specializing in comparative politics, and was the fourth president of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, California from July 2018 to May 2025. Herbst was previously the 16th president of Colgate University, and president and CEO of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. He resigned from his post at the Newseum in 2017 as the museum announced financial issues. Prior to assuming the presidency of Colgate in 2010, he was provost, executive vice president for academic affairs, and professor of political science at Miami University. He received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1983, M.A., MPhil from Yale University in 1985, and Ph.D. in 1987 also from Yale. He is married to Sharon Polansky, with whom he has three children, Matthew, Spencer, and Alana.

Herbst has written extensively on political and international affairs in Africa. He is the author of State Politics in Zimbabwe (Perspectives on Southern Africa) and States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton University Press, 2000), which received the 2001 Luebbert Best Book Award in comparative politics for the year 2000 from the American Political Science Association. It was also a finalist for the 2001 Melville J. Herskovits Award for the best book in African studies awarded by the African Studies Association.

A political realignment is a set of sharp changes in party-related ideology, issues, leaders, regional bases, demographic bases, and/or the structure of powers within a government. In the fields of political science and political history, this is often referred to as a critical election, critical realignment, or realigning election. These changes result in a restructuring of political focus and power that lasts for decades, usually replacing an older dominant coalition. Scholars frequently invoke the concept in American elections as this is where it is most common, though the experience also does occur in governments across the globe. It is generally accepted that the United States has had five distinct party systems, each featuring two major parties attracting a consistent political coalition and following a consistent party ideology, separated by four realignments. Two of the most apparent examples include the 1896 United States presidential election, when the issues of the American Civil War political system were replaced with those of the Populist and Progressive Era, and the 1932 United States presidential election, when the issues of the Populist and Progressive Eras were replaced by New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism. Realigning elections also contribute significantly to realigning (what are known in the field of comparative politics as) party systems—with 1828, for example, separating the First Party System and the Second Party System in the US.

Political realignments can be sudden (1–4 years) or can take place more gradually (5–20 years). Most often, as demonstrated in V. O. Key Jr.'s (1955) original hypothesis, a single "critical election" marks a sudden realignment. However he also argued that a cyclical process of realignment exists, wherein political views within interests groups gradually begin to separate which he designated as secular realignment. Political scientists and historians often disagree about which elections are realignments and what defines a realignment, and even whether realignments occur. The terms themselves are somewhat arbitrary, however, and usage among political scientists and historians does vary. In the US, Walter Dean Burnham argued for a 30–38 year "cycle" of realignments. Many of the elections often included in the Burnham 38-year cycle are considered "realigning" for different reasons.

Pippa Norris (born 10 July 1953) is a British American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, and she has served as the Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project.

Ronald F. Inglehart (September 5, 1934 – May 8, 2021) was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 100 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2019. From 2010, Inglehart also was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. Inglehart died on 8 May 2021.

Using data from the World Values Survey, he created a model of cultural dimensions which has two axes: secular-rational values versus traditional values and self-expression values versus survival values. The data has been often visualized in the form of the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world, which has been described as "one of the most famous pieces of Inglehart's research tradition".