Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a ...combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term factors relate to the personalities of office holders, the overall political agenda, and the majority situation in parliament, there are several structural factors that are relatively uniform across modern nations. First, the internationalization of modern politics (which is particularly pronounced within the European Union) has led to an ‘executive bias’ of the political process that has strengthened the role of political top elites vis-à-vis their parliamentary groups and/or their parties. Their predominance has been amplified further by the vastly expanded steering capacities of state machineries, which have severely reduced the scope of effective parliamentary control. At the same time, the declining stability of political alignments has increased the proportion of citizens whose voting decisions are not constrained by long-standing party loyalties. In conjunction with the mediatization of politics, this has increased the capacity of political leaders to bypass their party machines and to appeal directly to voters.As a result, three interrelated processes have led to a political process increasingly moulded by the inherent logic of presidentialism: increasing leadership power and autonomy within the political executive; increasing leadership power and autonomy within political parties; and increasingly leadership-centered electoral processes.The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the USA and Canada). While there are substantial cross-national differences, the overall thesis holds: modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of governance through which leadership is becoming more central and more powerful, but also increasingly dependent on successful immediate appeal to the mass public. Implications for democratic theory are considered.
In one of his last publications, Peter Mair documented how party membership had declined substantially in virtually all European democracies. As his collaborators on this piece, it seems pertinent ...that we take these findings as a point of departure and discuss what they mean for our understanding of party democracy. After all, the collapse of membership figures calls into question one of the central elements of our conceptualization of representative democracy, namely that it is based on voluntary political participation within political parties. All authoritative typologies of political parties consider the role of members to be one of their defining elements, although the cartel party most clearly envisages the marginalization of party members by professional party politicians. The traditional organizational allies of political parties (e.g. trade unions, organized religion) are subject to similar processes of erosion. In this article, we review the evidence of the social anchorage of political parties and discuss how political parties and party democracy can survive in an age where amateur politicians are becoming an increasingly rare species and parties are being transformed into organizational vehicles for those to whom politics is a profession rather than a vocation.
In Keith Dowding's recent 'Parliamentary Affairs' article (Dowding, 2013) he pours scorn on those who maintain that it is useful to speak of the 'presidentialisation' of British politics. Our edited ...volume 'The Presidentialization of Politics' (Poguntke and Webb, 2005) is one of those in the firing line.We should emphasise that there is a good deal in Dowding's article with which we do not take issue, not least because he either largely concurs with us about the developments affecting the British prime minister or because his attacks focus on versions of the presidentialisation argument to which we do not subscribe. But we offer here a brief rejoinder to the remaining issues which are relevant to our model.
How Political Parties Respond focuses specifically on the question of interest aggregation. Do parties today perform that function? If so, how? If not, in what different ways do they seek to show ...themselves responsive to the electorate? This fascinating book studies these questions with reference to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. A chapter on Russia demonstrates how newly powerful private interest groups and modern techniques of persuasion can work together to prevent effective party response to popular interests in systems where the authoritarian tradition remains strong.
Kay Lawson is Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University, and General Editor of the International Political Science Review. Her research and publications have focussed on the comparative study of political parties, including Political Parties and Democracy in the United States, The Comparative Study of Political Parties, Political Parties and Linkage (co-edited), When Parties Fail (co-edited), How Political Parties Work (editor), and Cleavages, Parties and Voters (co-edited). She is also the author of The Human Polity , now in its fifth edition. She is the 2003 recipient of the Eldersveld Award (for a lifetime of outstanding scholarly and professional contributions to the study of parties and political organizations). Thomas Poguntke is Professor of Political Science at SPIRE, Keele University, UK and Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. He is author of Parteiorganisation im Wandel: Gesellschaftliche Verankerung und organisatorische Anpassung im Europäischen Vergleich (Westdeutscher Verlag 2000), Alternative Politics: The German Green Party , (Edinburgh University Press 1993) and co-editor of several volumes politics and parties in western democracies. His main research interests are political parties and the comparative analysis of democratic regimes.
Towards a new party system Poguntke, Thomas
Party politics,
11/2014, Letnik:
20, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The results of the 2009 Bundestag election and subsequent Land elections suggest that the German party system is changing fundamentally. A few facts suffice to corroborate this statement: Volatility ...has now reached levels that were last recorded in the 1950s; turnout in national elections has reached an all-time low; the two large parties have had unprecedentedly poor results in the Bundestag elections while all three smaller parties reached more than 10 percent. The article shows that German catch-all parties are about to lose their hold on the electorate and, as a result, can no longer rely on being the senior parties of government. The article analyses these changes systematically using a range of quantitative indicators covering the entire post-war period. It shows a seminal erosion of the forces which have stabilized the German party system in earlier decades and discusses the repercussions for the functioning of German party democracy.
By the late 1990s Green parties had entered national governments in five Western European countries - Finland, Italy, Germany, France and Belgium. This book aims to provide an understanding of the ...differences and similarities of Green parties in coalition governments.
This article offers an overview of levels of party membership in European democracies at the end of the first decade of the twenty‐first century and looks also at changes in these levels over time, ...comparing party membership today with figures from both 1980 and the late 1990s. While relying primarily on the direct and individual membership figures as reported by the parties themselves, the fit of the data with survey data is explored and it is concluded that the two perform well in terms of convergent validity. The differences between large and small democracies are examined, as well as old and new democracies, and it is found that levels of party membership are related to both the size and age of the democratic polity in question. Finally, the implications of the patterns observed in the membership data are discussed, and it is suggested that membership has now reached such a low ebb that it may no longer constitute a relevant indicator of party organisational capacity.
This article argues that Karl Lauterbach accomplished the office of federal secretary of health mainly due to his Twitter activities and the concomitant exposure in political TV talk shows . ...Lauterbach had little intraparty support after his failed bid for SPD leadership . He did not hold a senior office within his parliamentary group or within the health policy community . The Land party of North Rhine-Westphalia had placed him on a hopeless position of the Land list for the federal elections . Finally, he played a minor role in the coalition negotiations and did not lead the talks on health policy for his party . With a view to all known informal rules for the selection of government ministers, he was certainly not part of the pool of likely candidates . The detailed quantitative analyses of Lauterbach’s Twit ter and media activities show that it was most likely this self-generated public visibility which explains his appointment .
This article demonstrates that the issue-yield concept is able to predict the electoral strategies of mainstream and challenger parties at the 2017 German federal election. While the electorate of ...mainstream parties favour valence issues, the Greens and the AfD can gain more by concentrating on socio-cultural positional issues. Relying on a unique survey covering 17 positional issues and 10 valence issues as well as an analysis of Twitter accounts, the article shows that contemporary Germany is characterised by a centrifugal competition on the socio-cultural dimension. At the same time, an asymmetric ideological confrontation persists on the socio-economic dimension, because the Left and the SPD still refer to their traditional welfare issues while the bourgeois parties no longer counter this with a contrasting free-market ideology. Thus, the economy is currently not the decisive issue in German politics. Migration, integration, and other socio-cultural issues are rather driving electoral competition.
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