New political parties have regularly appeared in developed democracies around the world. In some countries issues focusing on the environment, immigration, economic decline, and regional concerns ...have been brought to the forefront by new political parties. In other countries these issues have been addressed by established parties, and new issue-driven parties have failed to form. Most current research is unable to explain why under certain circumstances new issues or neglected old ones lead to the formation of new parties. Based on a novel theoretical framework, this study demonstrates the crucial interplay between established parties and possible newcomers to explain the emergence of new political parties.
Deriving stable hypotheses from a simple theoretical model, the book proceeds to a study of party formation in twenty-two developed democracies. New or neglected issues still appear as a driving force in explaining the emergence of new parties, but their effect is partially mediated by institutional factors, such as access to the ballot, public support for parties, and the electoral system. The hypotheses in part support existing theoretical work, but in part present new insights. The theoretical model also pinpoints problems of research design that are hardly addressed in the comparative literature on new political parties. These insights from the theoretical model lead to empirical tests that improve on those employed in the literature and allow for a much-enhanced understanding of the formation and the success of new parties.
Simon Hug is Lecturer in Political Science, University of Geneva.
In an in-depth comparative and long-term analysis, first published in 2004, Daniele Caramani studies the macro-historical process of the nationalization of politics. Using a great wealth of data on ...single constituencies in seventeen West European countries, he reconstructs the territorial structures of electoral support for political parties, as well as their evolution since the mid-nineteenth century from highly fragmented politics in the early stages toward nation-wide alignments. Caramani provides a multi-pronged empirical analysis through time, across countries, and between party families. The inclusion in the analysis of all the most important social and political cleavages - class, state-church, rural-urban, ethno-linguistic and religious - allows him to assess the nationalizing impact of the class cleavage that emerged from national and industrial revolutions, and the resistance of preindustrial cultural factors to national integration. Institutional and socio-economic factors are combined with actor-centered patterns and differences between national types of territorial configurations of the vote.
Modern presidents are usually depicted as party "predators" who neglect their parties, exploit them for personal advantage, or undercut their organizational capacities. Challenging this ...view,Presidential Party Buildingdemonstrates that every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to build his party into a more durable political organization while every Democratic president refused to do the same. Yet whether they supported their party or stood in its way, each president contributed to the distinctive organizational trajectories taken by the two parties in the modern era.
Unearthing new archival evidence, Daniel Galvin reveals that Republican presidents responded to their party's minority status by building its capacities to mobilize voters, recruit candidates, train activists, provide campaign services, and raise funds. From Eisenhower's "Modern Republicanism" to Richard Nixon's "New Majority" to George W. Bush's hopes for a partisan realignment, Republican presidents saw party building as a means of forging a new political majority in their image. Though they usually met with little success, their efforts made important contributions to the GOP's cumulative organizational development. Democratic presidents, in contrast, were primarily interested in exploiting the majority they inherited, not in building a new one. Until their majority disappeared during Bill Clinton's presidency, Democratic presidents eschewed party building and expressed indifference to the long-term effects of their actions.
Bringing these dynamics into sharp relief,Presidential Party Buildingoffers profound new insights into presidential behavior, party organizational change, and modern American political development.
Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves ...members' non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theory's predictions (pitted against others). It considers why procedural cartels form, arguing that agenda power is naturally subject to cartelization in busy legislatures. It argues that the majority party has cartelized agenda power in the U.S. House since the adoption of Reed's rules in 1890. The evidence demonstrates that the majority party seizes agenda control at nearly every stage of the legislative process in order to prevent bills that the party dislikes from reaching the floor.
In What’s Left of the Left, distinguished scholars of European and U.S. politics consider how center-left political parties have fared since the 1970s. They explore the left’s responses to the end of ...the postwar economic boom, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the erosion of traditional party politics, the expansion of market globalization, and the shift to a knowledge-based economy. Their comparative studies of center-left politics in Scandinavia, France, Germany, southern Europe, post–Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States emphasize differences in the goals of left political parties and in the political, economic, and demographic contexts in which they operate. The contributors identify and investigate the more successful center-left initiatives, scrutinizing how some conditions facilitated them, while others blocked their emergence or limited their efficacy.
The decline of the centre-left and centre-right people’s parties is arguably the most poignant feature of the crisis of democracy in Western Europe today. To understand why, this book explores the ...striking parallels between the life of democracy and that of the people’s parties over the course of the past century. It offers a transnational window on the history of democracy since 1918 by weaving together three epochs which are often studied apart: democracy’s troubled history in the Interwar era; the trente glorieuses after the Second World War; and the period since the 1970s. The book shows that democracy was only stabilized and legitimized when people’s parties emerged that managed to balance between facilitating popular participation from below, bridging divisions between social groups, and practising the politics of compromise. Ideas for such parties existed already in the first decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, Socialist and Catholic mass parties failed to transform into people’s parties, which was essential for the crisis (and breakdown) of democracy in the Interwar era. This was a traumatic experience which contributed to the unexpected stabilization of democracy after 1945 as party leaders transformed their organizations into broad-based people’s parties that embraced compromise and responsibility. However, this stability did not last, and paradoxically their transformation also harboured the seeds of democracy’s more recent problems. Over the past decades, people’s parties have struggled to connect to an individualizing society while having become increasingly absorbed by their governing responsibilities.
This book conducts a comparative analysis of political institutions and develops rigorous methods suitable for cross-national longitudinal analysis. An examination of political party systems in ...Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine shows striking differences of degrees and dynamics of political institutionalization in the five nations.
In the first comprehensive study of the subject in decades, political scholar Matthew Green disputes the conventional belief that the minority party in the U.S. House of Representatives is an ...unimportant political player. Examining the record of the House minority party from 1970 to the present, and drawing from a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data, Green shows how and why the minority seeks to influence legislative and political outcomes and demonstrates that the party's efforts can succeed. The result is a fascinating appreciation of what the House minority can do and why it does it, providing readers with new insights into the workings of this famously contentious legislative chamber.
Despite concerns about the debilitating effects of partisanship on democratic government, in recent years political parties have gained strength in state governments as well as in Washington. In many ...cases these parties function as machines. Unlike machines of the past that manipulated votes, however, today's machines determine which candidates can credibly compete in a primary. Focusing on the history and politics of California, Seth E. Masket reveals how these machines evolved and how they stay in power by directing money, endorsements, and expertise to favored candidates, who often tend toward the ideological extreme. In a provocative conclusion, Masket argues that politicians are not inherently partisan. Instead, partisanship is thrust upon them by actors outside the government with the power to manipulate primary elections.
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