Is Political Sociology Informed by Politica! Science?*

This article maps out some interdependencies between political science and political sociology. It then details some lessons that political sociologists might take from four contemporary literatures in political science: (1) rational choice work on rational individual action in institutional context; (2) the "nonlinear social systems " literature on the contextual determination of intensely embedded social actions; (3) the game-theoretic literature on strategic interactions among large emergent class and state actors; and (4) a more qualitative, inductive, and contextualized approach to the analysis of class and state action extending the tradition of Barrington Moore. The four literatures share a commitment to social action that is decreasingly common among sociologists. Yet they address questions of institutional constraint, contextual dynamics, and macrosocial history akin to those that are engaging their sociological contemporaries. This balance of attention between action and its constraints is the common element drawn from the several instructive political science literatures. Political sociology and political science are deeply interdependent. Thus, there is much relevant work in political science that should and does inform political sociology. I will start out by mapping the interdependence between these two disciplines. Then, I will detail some particular lessons that political sociologists would be wise to take from political science. Few differences in metatheory and method separate political sociology and political science. A decade ago, the influence of rational choice theory appeared so much greater within political science than within political sociology that this influence alone might have served to sharply distinguish the two. However, with the sociological assimilation of the rational choice perspective, this is no longer the case. Indeed, the metatheories and methods of the two are almost precisely the same: institutional and neoinstitutional; behaviorist and behavioral-ist; neofunctionalist and neo-Marxist; elite/managerial and pluralist and neo-pluralist; hermeneutic and postmodern; and multivariate, historicist and comparative historical