Product details
- ISBN 9781032900162
- Weight: 650g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 19 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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First Published in 1990, The Analysis of Political Structure is a major work of theory by one of our leading political scientists. David Easton here comes to grips with the nature of political structure, the way in which a political system is organized for making decisions, or its regime. Current methodologies within political science have failed to anticipate regime changes. We know little about the conditions for the emergence, maintenance, or decline of democratic or authoritarian types of regime structures. For example, the changes in Eastern Europe have come as a complete surprise. This liability to predict is, Easton argues, in part due to the limitations of the decompositional research typical of political science. Easton applies a method informed by theories of structuralism to the largely untouched field of political analysis. He takes a holistic systems analysis approach in place of predominant decompositional methods and argues that the organizational structure of political systems decides the forms regimes take.
To support his case, Easton notably engages the work of Nicos Poulantzas, a leading structural Althusserian Marxist. He shows how Poulantzas’ work supports the new statist movement, which fails to account for the variety of forms of regimes. This is a must read for students and scholars of political science.
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. At the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline's most widely used definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for the society. He was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine in 1997.
