The Current Canon: Best-Known (if not Best-Loved) Works (Updated October 2019) Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

Robert a. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), chapters 1 & 2.

Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) preface + pages 22-50; 86-100; 131-141; 178-350.

Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986).

Robert Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, The Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), preface + pp. 1-46.

Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies XLIV (1996): 936-957.

Margaret Levi, “A Model, a Method, and a Map: Rational Choice in Comparative and Historical Analysis,” in Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Kathleen Thelen, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Poltiics,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 369-404.

Peter A. Hall, "Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics." In James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis . Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 1-53 & 103-78.

Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder. 2007. Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 11 to 15 and 17.

Capoccia, Giovanni, and Daniel Ziblatt. "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond," Comparative Political Studies , 43: 8–9 (2010): 931–968.

Nancy Bermeo and Deborah Yashar, "Parties, Movements, and the Making of Democracy," chapter 1 in Bermeo and Yashar, eds., Parties, Movements, and Democracy in the Developing World (Cambridge UP, 2017).