The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis sets out to synthesize and critique for the first time those approaches to political science that offer a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the political world. The work in this Handbook has a common aim in being sensitive to the thoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modelling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behaviour. It shows that context matters in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural and historical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. The Handbook, written by scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factors systematically into account. It is one of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science.