International Tourism and Political Science Research

This paper points out that political scientists have been more negligent than other social researchers in investigating the phenomena of international mass tourism. They have not yet isolated tourism as a cluster of human activity from larger concerns such as general international relations, development, or foreign policy.There are three obvious levels of political activity related to tourism: politics of tourism in the marketplace, that is, in the metropolitan countries; politics and tourism in developing host nations; and ideological perception of international mass tourism. While there are other kinds or levels of politics involved in world tourism, these three deserve immediate political research.