Many philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists defend the claim that rational choice theory can provide the basis for a unified and comprehensive theory of social behaviour. Rational choice models are theoretically generalized to explain the behaviour studied by nearly all social science disciplines, from political science to psychology and sociology. Specific applications include go...

Panel data analysis is a method of studying a particular subject within multiple sites, periodically observed over a defined time frame. Within the social sciences, panel analysis has enabled researchers to undertake longitudinal analyses in a wide variety of fields. In economics, panel data analysis is used to study the behavior of firms and wages of people over time. In political science, it ...

This article reviews how major theorists of nationalism – from Ernest Renan to Benedict Anderson – have tried to come to grips with the puzzle that Swiss nationalism and the Swiss state present in view of the monoethnic states that surround it. I will argue that this puzzle disappears when assuming a political sociology perspective that highlights the networks of political alliances underlying ...

Why are some policies protested more than others? New data on protest against eight categories of taxation in twenty rich democracies from 1980 to 2010 reveal that economically and socially concentrated taxes are protested most, whereas taxes that confer entitlement to benefits are protested least. Other features of policy design often thought to affect the salience or visibility of costs are u...

The healthcare regulatory concepts used in Brazilian scientific publications on healthcare management were reviewed. A typo-logical classification for regulatory concepts was developed from the most current ideas in five disciplines: life sciences, law, economics, sociology and political science. Four ideas stood out: control, balance, adaptation and direction, with greatest emphasis on the tec...

This paper presents a historical sociological analysis of the sociology of sport. It draws on theoretical insights from the sociology of professions to examine ‘state of the field’ reviews written by sociologists of sport. The paper argues that in establishing why the sociology of sport emerged, how people identified its earliest manifestations, and how the subdiscipline’s boundaries were drawn...

This article considers how well the existing sociological literature on immigrant integration and assimilation responds to public fears over multiculturalism. The current backlash against multiculturalism rests on both its perceived negative effects for immigrants’ socioeconomic integration and its failure to encourage civic and political cohesion. I offer a brief review of multiculturalism as ...