Inside Countries

"Comparative politics is conventionally seen as the study of politics across countries. Still, the field has a prominent and longstanding tradition of studying politics not across countries but inside them, especially by zooming down to subnational units. Indeed, political science was arguably born subnational: one of the discipline's oldest canonical texts, The Politics, written by Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., offered a typology of political systems based on a comparative study of 158 city constitutions in ancient Greece"--