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This revised and expanded second edition of African Politics in Comparative Perspective reviews fifty years of research on politics in Africa and addresses some issues in a new light, keeping in mind the changes in Africa since the first edition was written in 2004. The book synthesizes insights from different scholarly approaches and offers an original interpretation of the knowledge accumulated in the field. Goran Hyden discusses how research on African politics relates to the study of politics in other regions and mainstream theories in comparative politics. He focuses on such key issues as why politics trumps economics, rule is personal, state is weak and policies are made with a communal rather than an individual lens. The book also discusses why in the light of these conditions agriculture is problematic, gender contested, ethnicity manipulated and relations with Western powers a matter of defiance.

A careful review of the literature in political science and neighboring social science disciplines shows that prevailing assumptions in the international development policy community about improved governance as a principal mechanism to reduce poverty in Africa rests more on faith than science. Conventional policy models for tackling poverty fail to take into account the peculiar socioeconomic and political conditions in Africa, where the vast majority of those living on one dollar a day or less are only marginally captured by market and state institutions and instead rely on solving their problems ''outside the system.'' Poverty reduction through formal institutions therefore becomes ineffective. Although political science and other neighboring social science disciplines offer insights into these peculiarities, these contributions have been largely ignored to date. One reason is that economists continue to dominate the international development policy agenda. Another is that political scientists have typically looked at how economic variables shape political ones, rather than the other way around, as implied in the current governance agenda. Governance remains an undertheorized area of research held back by two chasms, one between economists and other social scientists and another between the scientific and the policy communities, to the detriment of gaining a better understanding of how it may help reduce poverty in Africa.informal institutions ͉ Millenium Development Goals ͉ development policy ͉ politics