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Undergraduates often struggle with theoretical perspectives in political science. Often students can get a better handle on theories if they are able to relate them to something tangible in their experience. Lichbach and Zuckerman lay out cultural, rational actor, and structural perspectives as a way to think more systematically about comparative politics but often students struggle with these meta-theories and the different ways they encourage us to think theoretically about comparative politics. In this paper, we discuss a set of exercises that enable students to get a better handle on cultural, rational actor, and structural perspectives on comparative politics by making them 'lab rats in their own experiments.' We group these exercises together and treat them as a Comparative Politics Game Show. In this paper, we describe the different exercises and how they were used and our view of the utility of this approach for teaching comparative politics theory. Adapted from the source document.

Research in comparative politics on informal institutions can be grouped into analysis of norms and values within government institutions and studies of self-governance in communities that are relatively isolated from states. Three recent books by Nadya Hajj, Shelby Grossman, and David Skarbek advance this research agenda by showing that self-governance can be significant even in contexts where the state is present, including refugee camps, markets in urban settings, and in prisons. They also offer abundant insights into how to overcome challenges with measuring and analyzing informal institutions. Rather than prioritize private or public governance, the authors see these as imperfect alternatives that invite analysis of why private governance works better in some contexts than in others for communities seeking to improve their lives in challenging circumstances.

This article compares the state of the art of comparative politics in Britain with the US and continental Europe. Three main traditions are distinguished: a narrative single-country tradition, in which comparative politics is understood as the study of foreign countries, a methodology-oriented tradition, which is concerned with the development of the techniques of comparison, and an analytical comparative tradition, which understands comparative politics as a combination of substance and method. It is argued that comparative politics in Britain is dominated by single-country studies, while the methodology-oriented and the analytical comparative traditions are more strongly developed in the US and continental Europe respectively. A comparative analysis of research interests and teaching provision furthermore demonstrates that, in Britain, comparative politics is an underdeveloped sub-field in terms of both teaching and research. This currently results in the need to import comparativists trained outside the British system in order to sustain the discipline. The article concludes by stressing the potential for the development of comparative politics in Britain.

Although scholars tend to downplay the role of religion in political life, the vast majority of people in the world profess a strong allegiance to some spiritual faith. Secularization theory has long held that religion would become irrelevant, leading many comparative scholars to ignore this potentially significant variable. A recent resurgence in religious fundamentalism and "new religious politics" has led more scholars to consider religious actors as important. However, research in this area befalls many of the same problems inherent in earlier secularization theories. A new body of scholarship, known as the "religious economy" school, seeks to address these problems by developing theories built on solid microlevel foundations of human behavior. This line of research holds great promise for the study of religion in comparative politics.