Cheap Classics in Voting Behavior (Book) (Richard G. Niemi, Herbert F. Weisberg) Price

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Customer Reviews of Classics in Voting Behavior

Fragmentation and Repetition Only
This is a somewhat useful compilation of writings by experts in political science, dealing with the various issues of political behavior and voting patterns. The works collected here are apparently "classics" because they rose from obscure journals or anthologies, and ended up being influential in the field of political science. The writings are categorized into the areas of voter turnout, ideology, party identification, and others. The editors do a fairly good (if dry) job of introducing the subject matter of each section and describing why each selection is considered influential. The problem here is that the collected works, by the various authors working in various time periods, merely add up to repetition rather than variety. There are a few exceptions, such as one comparative study of voter behavior in the Netherlands. But otherwise, the various authors fail to convince you that their articles are improvements on earlier ones in the same subject area, when all they're really doing is reaching slightly different results after statistical testing. That makes this collection feel extremely repetitive. Meanwhile, the editors strategically chose to only reproduce portions of some works, in order to stick with the most influential findings. That keeps the size of this book manageable, but several submissions begin and/or end with an ellipsis ("...") and are fragmented and under-elaborated to the point where they cease to be truly useful. [~doomsdayer520~]