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Apart from some notable exceptions, education is regrettably understudied in comparative politics. This paucity stems from both a dearth of reliable data on schooling and the fact that education raises analytical issues that fall outside the typical domain of political scientists. In light of education's crucial role in everything from citizen attitudes to earnings to economic growth, we recommend that political scientists pay more attention to education. In particular, comparative researchers should shift from an almost exclusive focus on average levels of schooling to explaining the causes and consequences of educational inequality. To that end, we provide a broad comparative framework for analyzing the politics of education. In our formulation, skill-biased technological change and factor endowments condition the extent to which firms demand human capital. The supply of skills is a function of the interests and institutions that link voters and politicians. We conclude by positing theoretical and empirical puzzles for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Robert Franzese and Jude Hays on the impact of international diffusion on capital taxation and another by Christopher Anderson and Matthew Singer on the relationship between voter participation and inequality.

The author comments on the article "Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics, " by Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder published within the issue. He remarks that the authors had outlined that qualitative research on comparative politics is less rigorous that it constricts its capacity to form valid casual claims. He notes that while the authors made such assertion, they have failed to present data to prove its true.

Research on comparative decentralization and federalism is a booming industry. Recent research integrates insights from political science, economics, and economic history in emphasizing the importance of incentives for the operation of decentralized government. Such work has focused particular attention on fiscal, representative, and party institutions. In reviewing the past decade's research, I make two arguments. First, the comparative research on decentralization and federalism provides a model for how comparative politics can address some of the most profound questions in social thought by focusing on a theoretically and empirically tractable aspect of governance. Second, although the research addresses many of the key questions in comparative politics, it also struggles with some of the same problems and challenges as comparative politics writ large, particularly the issue of institutional endogeneity. Attention to endogeneity is central to better understanding the workings of decentralized governments and providing less facile policy recommendations for the reform of places as diverse as the United States and Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]