The fifth edition of this seminal textbook by best-selling author Andrew Heywood continues to lead the way in providing a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to politics. Renowned for its engaging and accessible style, this book helps students to understand the discipline's foundational concepts and theories and use these to make sense of its key subfields, from elections and voting to security and global governance. Systematically revised and updated throughout, it also uses a range of tried-and-tested pedagogical features to draw links between different standpoints and help make contemporary institutions, events and developments come to life. Drawing on a wide range of international examples, this text is the ideal choice for lecturers around the world. Carefully designed and written to map onto the way the subject is introduced at degree level, it remains the go-to text for undergraduate introductory and comparative politics courses. Furthermore, it can also be used as pre-course reading or as a point of reference throughout politics degrees, majors or minors.