In What is Political Sociology?, Elisabeth S. Clemens offers a smart primer on political sociology that asks what is distinct about this sub-field. By surveying its main concepts and research agendas—power and politics, states, nation-states, social movements, social change, and transnationalism—she shows how political sociology examines social processes that influence both formal politics and the politics that take place in everyday settings. Clemens notes that that political sociology differs

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... from political science in that the former studies politics in various settings and that patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power are shaped by social relations, while the latter studies "the formal institutions and acts of governing" (p.1).