Political Sociology

Political sociologists study how social relations shape political processes, institutions, organizations, and events. Some political sociologists, for example, study the ways class, gender, or race relations influence state-building, or movement-building. Some political sociologists study how rational decision-making processes affect the trajectories of states, social movements, or interest groups. Some political sociologists study how cultural traditions, or collective definitions of identity, shape and are shaped by political mobilizations, or everyday practices of citizenship. Political sociologists work on the individual, social-structural, organizational, and/or cultural levels of analysis. Political sociologists in our department draw on and combine a range of theoretical perspectives, including Marxism, neo-Weberianism, cultural analyses, rational action, world-system analysis, and social movement theory. We also represent diverse methodological orientations, including collection of and quantitative analysis of data from surveys, government archives, and newspapers; mathematical modeling, qualitative analyses of comparative and historical data; qualitative analyses of participant-observation evidence.