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With an entire discipline devoted to Political Science, what is distinctive about Political Sociology? This concise book explains what a sociological perspective brings to our understanding of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of different forms of political order. Crucially, political sociology expands the field of view to the politics that happen in other social settings-in the family, at work, in civic associations as well as the ways in which social attributes such as class, religion and gender shape patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power. Political Sociology grapples with these issues across an enormous range of historical and geographic settings, from the intimate relations that constitute family politics to the geo-political scales of war and trade. Using these central concept, ‘What is Political Sociology?’ discusses the major forms of political order (states, empires and nation-states), processes of regime formation and revolution, the social bases for political participation, policy formation as well as feedbacks, social movements and social change and the possibilities for new forms of transnational politics.