Why have dominant parties persisted in power for decades in countries spread across the globe? Why did most eventually lose? Why Dominant Parties Lose develops a theory of single-party dominance, its ...durability, and its breakdown into fully competitive democracy. Greene shows that dominant parties turn public resources into patronage goods to bias electoral competition in their favor and virtually win elections before election day without resorting to electoral fraud or bone-crushing repression. Opposition parties fail because their resource disadvantages force them to form as niche parties with appeals that are out of step with the average voter. When the political economy of dominance erodes, the partisan playing field becomes fairer and opposition parties can expand into catchall competitors that threaten the dominant party at the polls. Greene uses this argument to show why Mexico transformed from a dominant party authoritarian regime under PRI rule to a fully competitive democracy.
American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton ...and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance. This text develops a unique historical perspective of US party development using the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson as a framework for analysis. While Hamilton wanted to marry freedom to a strong, active federal government with an energetic president who would act on behalf of all citizens, Jefferson believed that freedom should be allied to local civic virtue, with governmental responsibilities placed primarily at the local level. Today, Hamiltonian nationalism finds its home in the Democratic Party, while Republicans have espoused Jeffersonian localism since 1964. Using this historical framework, American Political Parties examines a range of topics including marketing and social media, campaign finance, reforms in the presidential nominating process, political demography, and third parties. In this new edition (previously published as Party On!), the authors describe four possible futures in the wake of the 2020 election and why Americans believed it was “the most important” election in their lifetimes. The unique history of US political parties as set forth by the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson is at an inflection point. Republicans have become an insurgent party fully under the control of Donald Trump while Democrats have an opportunity to create a new majority coalition. This juncture poses unique challenges to our democracy and constitutional framework, and the book describes four possible outcomes, postulating where American political parties are headed in this decade. This book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In this study of the breakdown of traditional party loyalties and voting patterns, prominent comparativists and country specialists examine the changes now occurring in the political systems of ...advanced industrial democracies.Originally published in 1985.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of- print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The UK parliament of 2017–2019 had to decide what form of Brexit, if any, it would accept in the government’s negotiations with the EU over a withdrawal agreement. Despite a large majority of MPs ...having supported Remain in the 2016 referendum, with most opposed to a ‘hard’ Brexit of looser ties between the UK and the EU, all attempts to pass a ‘soft’ Brexit failed. The final withdrawal agreement reflected a hard Brexit that was closer to the preferences of a 28-strong group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs than to those of any other party or faction in a 650-seat parliament. This article identifies the two-party system for government as a crucial variable in explaining this unexpected outcome. Governments seek majorities from among their own MPs rather than relying on the uncertain support of the opposition. This not only makes party cohesion vital, but also creates leverage for organised factions to hold sway.
This research note describes an update to Golder's (2005)Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset. We extend the temporal scope of the original dataset by including all legislative and presidential ...elections that took place in democratic states from 2001 to 2011. In addition to significantly expanding the size of the DES dataset, we offer a simplified classification scheme for electoral systems. We also provide more detailed information about all democratic elections since 1946, including the dates for each round of elections as well as the rules used in different electoral tiers. A brief temporal and geographic overview of the data is presented.
► Our research note describes an update to Golder's (2005) Democratic Electoral Systems dataset. ► The new dataset comprises information on 1197 legislative and 433 presidential elections. ► We provide a brief temporal and geographic overview of the data.
Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ...ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyses with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.
A redistributive wave across Latin America provided credence to existing explanations that emphasize the importance of democracy and the political left for democratic redistribution. Yet, neither of ...these theories tells the entire story behind the contemporary politics of inequality
in Latin America. This article stresses the importance of party systems for democratic redistribution, especially their role in increasing the scope of social policy as well as igniting competitive electoral environments that incentivize political elites to redistribute, leading to the amelioration
of inequality over time. Utilizing a time- series cross-sectional dataset on fifteen Latin American countries covering the period of 1990?2015, and extending the analysis to sixty-five global democracies, this article finds that countries with institutionalized party systems exhibit greater
income redistribution and lower levels of inequality than those with inchoate counterparts.
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