InfoTrac Reader Introduction Welcome to Comparative Politics: The On Line Reader. This electronic book consists of articles from InfoTrac™ an on line library of over 14 million articles as in June 2003. To use the reader, you must have access to InfoTrac. If you bought a Thomson Learning/Wadsworth textbook, it came with a passcode that will give you access to this remarkable data bank of articles for four months. If not, you will be able to use InfoTrac if your library has purchased a subscription. Check with your reference librarians to see if you can use InfoTrac and to determine how to do so. This reader is designed to mirror Thomson Learning’s four textbooks in comparative politics. Charles Hauss, Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to Global Challenges Michael LeRoy,Comparative Politics: An Introduction Using Explorit John McCormick, Comparative Politics in Transition Thomas Magstadt, Nations and Governments In fact, the reader could be used with any textbook and has been designed for use by everyone from beginning undergraduates to PhD students. Comparative Politics: The On Line Reader is also very much a work in progress. One of the benefits of publishing books on line is that the authors can constantly update the work, something we will be doing at least three times a year. Publishing this way is also a new phenomenon. Indeed, this is the first book of this sort we know of in comparative politics. Therefore, feel free to email Charles Hauss, the senior author, with suggestions for articles to add and delete and other ways of improving this book in general. Origins The idea of compiling this book came first from a seemingly innocuous email from Professor Tracy Lightcap of Lagrange College. Professor Lightcap was looking for a reader he could use in his introductory comparative politics course and could not find one that met his needs. He and Hauss discussed the situation and soon discovered that the market is not big enough to support such a book published in a traditional manner. Then, Hauss taught a graduate seminar in comparative politics for the first time in fall 2002 and found that the same problem existed at that level as well. There are a few good anthologies on the market, but they work best for advanced PhD students who already have a firm grounding in comparative politics substantively and conceptually, which was not the case for most of his students. Therefore, for the final session of the seminar in December 2002, he gave the class a dual challenge. They would design a short textbook for MA students on comparative politics (which we may or may not write) and the outlines of a reader which would work for them and for introductory students. We created a team of Hauss and the three students who plan to continue and study for a doctorate to pull together the articles in early 2003 (another advantage of online publication is that it can happen far more rapidly than is possible for the production of conventional books). Premises This book has chapters on the key countries and concepts covered in the four books mentioned above. We will add other countries over the course of the next year. Each chapter begins with a brief introduction to the country or concept. This is by no means a substitute for reading a full chapter in one of the texts. Instead, the introductions are designed to provide a brief overview, including noting events that have occurred since any of the four text books were published. Further updates on some of the countries can be found at Hauss’ web site. The rest of the chapter includes reference to anywhere from 10-20 articles from the InfoTrac data base. Like dives in a swim meet, these are coded by degree of difficulty, with some "introductory" ones for students taking a first course in comparative politics, "intermediate" ones that advanced undergrads should have no trouble handling, and "advanced" ones which would best be part of a graduate education. Each entry includes a brief overview of the author’s argument and a notation as to whether the article is written at a basic, intermediate, or advanced level. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions do not allow us to give direct links to the articles themselves. Articles on each chapter are arranged chronologically, beginning with the most recent ones. We plan to update each chapter in June, September, and December of each year. Digging Deeper We think these are the best articles for students of comparative politics available on InfoTrac. However, they barely scratch the surface. On 30 December 2002, for instance, there were 599 articles on Iraqi politics, which is hardly surprising given the events since the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the looming war. So, dig deeper. Look for articles yourself. In fact, one of the benefits of InfoTrac and similar data bases is that they allow students to determine at least some of what they will read themselves. Students get to take more responsibility for their own education, asking their own questions, which, we have discovered, makes the educational process on both sides of the professorial desk more enlightening—and more fun.