Includes bibliographies and index.

Part I. Political science : The discipline and its scope and theory -- Political theory : The evolution of a sub-field / John G. Gunnell -- Political theory and the art of heresthetics / William H. Riker -- Toward theories of data : The state of political methodology / Christopher H. Achen -- Self portrait : Profile of political scientists / Naomi B. Lynn -- Part II. American political processes and policymaking -- The scholarly commitment to parties / Leon D. Epstein -- The forest for the trees : Blazing trails for congressional research / Leroy N. Rieselbach -- Judicial politics : Still a distinctive field / Lawrence Baum -- Public policy analysis : Some recent developments and current problems / Susan B. Hansen -- Federalism : The challenge of conflicting theories and contemporary practice / David R. Beam, Timothy J. Conlan, David B. Walker -- Part III. Comparative political processes and policymaking -- Comparative public policy : An assessment / M. Donald Hancock -- Studying the politics of development and change : The state of the art / Joel S. Migdal -- Part IV. Micropolitical behavior : American and comparative -- Voting behavior research in the 1980s : An examination of some old and new problem areas / Herbert B. Asher -- Diversity and complexity in American public opinion / Donald R. Kinder -- Changing paradigms in comparative political behavior / Ronald Inglehart -- The elusive paradigm : Gender, politics and political behavior / Marianne Githens -- Part V. International politics -- Theory of world politics : Structural realism and beyond / Robert O. Keohane -- International interactions and processes : The internal vs. external debate revisited / Bruce Russett -- Part VI. Addresses from the 1982 Lasswell symposium : The uses of social science -- Politics and the uses of social science research / Donna E. Shalala -- Basic inquiry and applied use in the social sciences / Donald E. Stokes.