"Comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts." - Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method
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Salvatore Babones
Salvatore Babones is a quantitative comparative sociologist whose research focuses on post-socialist transition societies. He also engages in research on Australian social policy and the use of quantitative methods for cross-national comparisons. He is the author or editor of fourteen books and several dozen academic research articles. He writes extensively on public policy issues, and is a widely-cited commentator on Australian higher education.
Salvatore is currently researching books on:
Australian Immigration Policy (2026 project)
Economic Growth in China and India (2027 project)
The Sociology of Sanatana Dharma (2026-2030 project)
Salvatore's short book The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts was named "Best on Politics 2018" by the Wall Street Journal. His 2021 book Australia's Universities: Can They Reform? was covered in every major Australian newspaper. And his 2025 book, Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World's First Democracy, showed how international rankings systematically underrate India's democratic success.
AUTHORED BOOKS
India is one of the world’s great democratic success stories. In this rigorously empirical analysis, a comparative social scientist—an American sociologist based in Sydney—offers a dispassionate assessment of India’s democratic evolution. Benchmarking India against both established Western democracies and its own political past, the book challenges prevailing narratives shaped by ideological biases. Drawing on quantitative data and primary historical sources, the author reveals a dynamic, complex, and resilient democratic system operating in a fractured and deeply traditional society. A must-read for academics and general readers alike, this book cuts through politicized scholarship to offer a clear-eyed perspective on the world’s largest democracy.
Struck by simultaneous financial, pedagogical, and ideological challenges, Australia’s entire university system stands in desperate need of reform. But good reform requires good data, and each of the major players in Australia’s university debate has strong incentives to warp the data in its own favour. In this timely book, sociologist and higher education commentator Salvatore Babones delivers the insights Australians need in order to reform what are, after all, their universities.
In this provocative and highly original book, Salvatore Babones argues that democracy has been undermined by a quiet but devastating power grab conducted by a class of liberal experts. They have advanced a global rights-based agenda which has tilted the balance away from the lively and vibrant unpredictability of democratic decision-making toward the creeping technocratic authority of liberal consensus. Populism represents, contends Babones, an imperfect but reinvigorating political flood that has the potential to sweep away decades of institutional detritus and rejuvenate democracy across the West.
Co-authored with Hartmut Elsenhans.
Diverging from the popular narrative of increased liberalization, this book argues specifically for direct government investment in human infrastructure; policies that increase wages and the bargaining power of labor; and the strategic use of exchange rates to encourage export-led growth. These measures raise up the majority and finance future productivity by driving broader consumption and fostering investment within national borders.
After a meteoric rise, China's once inexorable growth has come to a screeching halt. With it ends China's dream of establishing a new tianxia (‘harmonious order’) in Asia with China at its centre. Salvatore Babones provides an up-to-date assessment of China's economic problems and how they are undermining China's challenge to the Western-dominated world order. As China's neighbours and many of its own most talented people look to the United States to ensure their security and prosperity, global power is slowly but surely consolidating in a twenty-first century American Tianxia.
Decades of destructive social, economic, and political policies have devastated poor, working, and even middle class American communities. It is now clear to everyone that the emperor has no clothes, that harsh austerity does not bring prosperity, and that the wealthy have no intention to see their wealth trickle down. Each generation is no longer better off than the ones that came before. The progressive agenda laid out in Sixteen for '16 charts a realistic path toward a better tomorrow.
Co-authored with Gustavo Esteva and Philipp Babcicky.
This book offers a new vision for development, demystifying the statistics that international organizations use to measure development and introducing the alternative concept of buen vivir: the state of living well. The authors argue that it is possible for everyone on the planet to live well, but only if we learn to live as communities rather than as individuals and to nurture our respective commons. Scholars and students of global development studies are well-aware that development is a difficult concept. This thought-provoking book offers them advice for the future of development studies and hope for the future of humankind.
A comprehensive guide to QMCR, the book presents an overview of the questions that can be answered using QMCR, details the steps of the research process, and concludes with important guidelines and best practices for conducting QMCR. The book assumes that the reader has a sound grasp of the fundamentals of linear regression modeling, but no advanced mathematical knowledge is required in order for researchers and students to read, understand, and enjoy the book. A conversational discussion style supplemented by 75 tables and figures makes the book's methodological arguments accessible to both students and professionals. Extensive citations refer readers back to primary discussions in the literature, and a comprehensive index provides easy access to coverage of specific techniques.
Global patterns of economic development have hardly changed over the past fifty years. All of the countries that were rich then are still rich now, and nearly all of the countries that were poor then are still poor now. This volume such patterns in the international structure of income over five decades. The few examples of upward mobility in the world-economy are examined in detail, with a special section devoted to the recent rise of China. Statistical estimates and graphs of global income inequality at both the national and individual levels of analysis are included. A key innovation of this volume is the formulation of hybrid models of economic growth combining elements from world- systems theory in sociology and neoclassical growth theory in economics. These models show that while investment is correlated with growth in the core of the world-economy, demographic effects predominate in the peripheries.
EDITED BOOKS
Co-edited with Christopher Chase-Dunn.
World-systems analysis has developed rapidly over the past thirty years. Today's students and junior scholars come to world-systems analysis as a well-established approach spanning all of the social sciences. The best world-systems scholarship, however, is spread across multiple methodologies and more than half a dozen academic disciplines. Aiming to crystallize forty years of progress and lay the groundwork for the continued development of the field, the Handbook of World-Systems Analysis is a comprehensive review of the state of the field of world-systems analysis since its origins almost forty years ago.
Co-edited with Christopher Chase-Dunn.
The essays in Global Social Change explore globalization from a world-systems perspective, untangling its many contested meanings. This perspective offers insights into globalization's gradual and uneven growth throughout the course of human social evolution. In this informative and exciting volume, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones bring together accomplished senior sociologists and outstanding younger scholars with a mix of interests, expertise, and methodologies to offer an introduction to ways of studying and understanding global social change.
This book brings together the latest research findings from some of the most respected medical and social scientists in the world. It surveys four pathways to understanding the social determinants of health: differences in individual health behaviours; group advantage and disadvantage; psychosocial factors in individual health; and healthy and unhealthy societies, shedding light on the costs and consequences of today's high-inequality social models.
This four-volume Major Work contains texts which explore both the foundations of latent variables and factor analysis, and specific contemporary challenges in the field. The collection has been designed as a multi-disciplinary resource, with literature drawn from many different areas of study, such as sociology, psychology, education and political science. The combination of these elements makes for a truly comprehensive and user-friendly research tool, invaluable to social scientists across a range of disciplines.
This new four-volume set on Applied Statistical Modeling brings together seminal articles in the field, selected for their exemplification of the specific model type used, their clarity of exposition and their importance to the development of their respective disciplines. The set as a whole is designed to serve as a master class in how to apply the most commonly used statistical models with the highest level of methodological sophistication. It is in essence a user's guide to statistical best-practice in the social sciences.
This new four-volume major work presents a collection of landmark studies on the topic of regression modeling, identifying the most important, fundamental articles out of thousands of relevant contributions. The social sciences - particularly sociology and political science - have made extensive use of regression models since the 1960s, and regression modeling continues to be the staple method of the field. The collection is framed by an orienting essay which presents to a guide to regression modelling, written with applied practitioners in mind.
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