This book draws on Professor Arend Lijphart's lifetime experience of research and publication in democracy and comparative politics and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work.

Arend Lijphart is one of the world's leading and most influential political scientists whose work has had a profound impact on the study of democracy and comparative politics. Thinking about Democracy draws on a lifetime's experience of research and publication in this area and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work. The book also contains an entirely new introduction and conclusion where Professor Lijphart assesses the development of his thought and the practical impact it has had on emerging democracies. This volume will be of enormous interest to all students and scholars of democracy and comparative politics, and politics and international relations in general.

Thinking about Democracy is the definitive collection of four decades of work on the power-sharing model of democracy by its most important analyst and advocate, Arend Lijphart. It is an indispensable work for all students of democracy and comparative politics, in part because it provides a frank and fascinating portrait of how the concepts, theory, and empirical research have evolved over the life of a great political scientist.Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Co-editor, Journal of Democracy Arend Lijphart's work has always been intellectually first class. Thinking about Democracy assembles the cream of his essays on power- sharing and comparative political analysis of the last forty years, and crowns them with fresh appraisals and commentary. Engaged with both major intellectual and policy problems these chapters display why he is widely and rightly regarded as the world's premier political scientist of democracy of the last fifty years. Current students and readers alike, will be delighted that these essays are brought together in this compact and well-organized collection that is sure to be reprinted many times in the decades ahead. Brendan O'Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA It is fascinating to have in one volume the main stations in the broad based intellectual career of Arend Lijphart. His key question was always how to construct the best possible democratic institutions, an endeavour that he accomplished with great success in the political science community. Jürg Steiner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Bern, Germany