Why do strong opposition party organizations emerge in some democratizing countries, while those in others remain weak or quickly fragment on ethnic lines? This book offers an explanation for why ...opposition parties vary in organizational form, cohesion, and mobilizational reach. The book draws upon an in-depth analysis of three countries in Anglophone Africa: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya. Though these countries share similar institutional frameworks, including electoral rules, party development has taken a different route in each. The explanation emphasizes the ways in which historical legacies interact with strategic choices to produce different trajectories of party development. In terms of the role of history, the book argues that strong opposition parties are more likely where authoritarian states relied on alliances with corporate actors like labor. In these contexts, ruling parties armed their allies, providing them with mobilizing structures and political resources that could later be used to challenge the state. Secondly, opposition parties are more likely to maintain their organizational cohesion and the commitment of activists when they use strategies and appeals that escalate conflict and reorient social boundaries around the lines of partisan affiliation. Polarization forges stronger parties, but it also increases the likelihood of violence and authoritarian retrenchment. The book provides an explanation of why democratization in the hybrid regimes of the late Third Wave may prove more conflictual and more protracted than earlier transitions to democracy.
Though the extreme right was not particularly successful in the 1999 European elections, it continues to be a major factor in the politics of Western Europe. This book, newly available in paperback, ...provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the extreme right in the Netherlands (Centrumdemocraten, Centrumpartij'86), Belgium (Vlaams Blok) and Germany (Die Republikaner, Deutsche Volksunion). On the basis of original research - using party literature - the author concludes that though individual parties might stress different issues, the extreme right party family does share a core ideology of nationalism, xenophobia, welfare chauvinism, and law and order. The author's research and conclusions clearly have broader implications for the study of the extreme right phenomenon and party ideology in general, and the book should be of interest to anyone studying or researching in the areas of European politics, political ideologies, political parties, extremism, racism or nationalism.
This book compares media and political systems in East-Central as well as in Western Europe in order to identify the reasons possibly responsible for the extensive and intensive party control over ...the media. This phenomenon is widely experienced in many of the former communist countries since the political transformation. The author argues that differences in media freedom and in the politicization of the news media are rooted in differences in party structures between old and new democracies, and, notably, the fact that young parties in the new members of the European Union are short of resources, which makes them more likely to take control of and to exploit media resources.
Contributing to the growing discourse on political parties in Asia, this book looks at parties in Southeast Asia's most competitive electoral democracies of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. ...It highlights the diverse dynamics of party politics in the region and provides new insights into organizational structures, mobilizational strategies and the multiple dimensions of linkages between political parties and their voters.
The book focuses on the prominence of clientelistic practices and strategies, both within parties as well as between parties and their voters. It demonstrates that clientelism is extremely versatile and can take many forms, ranging from traditional, personalized relationships between a patron and a client to the modern reincarnations of broker-driven network clientelism that is often based on more anonymous relations. The book also discusses how contemporary political parties often combine clientelistic practices with more formal patterns of organization and communication, thus raising questions about neat analytical dichotomies.
Straddling the intersection between political science and area studies, this book is of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Southeast Asian politics, and political scientists and Asian Studies specialists with a broader research interest in comparative democratization studies.
As Europe enters a significant phase of re-integration of East and West, it faces an increasing problem with the rise of far-right political parties. Cas Mudde offers the first comprehensive and ...truly pan-European study of populist radical right parties in Europe. He focuses on the parties themselves, discussing them both as dependent and independent variables. Based upon a wealth of primary and secondary literature, this book offers critical and original insights into three major aspects of European populist radical right parties: concepts and classifications; themes and issues; and explanations for electoral failures and successes. It concludes with a discussion of the impact of radical right parties on European democracies, and vice versa, and offers suggestions for future research.
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.
The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America explores why indigenous movements have recently won elections for the first time in the history of the region. Raúl L. Madrid argues that some indigenous ...parties have won by using inclusive populist appeals to reach out to whites and mestizos. Indigenous parties have managed to win support across ethnic lines because the long history of racial mixing in Latin America blurred ethnic boundaries and reduced ethnic polarization. The appeals of the indigenous parties have especially resonated in the Andean countries because of widespread disenchantment with the region's traditional parties. The book contains up-to-date qualitative and quantitative analyses of parties in seven countries, including detailed case studies of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.
Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman rely on historical data spanning back to the eighteenth century from Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States to revise our understanding of why a ...country’s party system consists of national or regional parties. They demonstrate that the party systems in these four countries have been shaped by the authority granted to different levels of government. Departing from the conventional focus on social divisions or electoral rules in determining whether a party system will consist of national or regional parties, they argue instead that national party systems emerge when economic and political power resides with the national government. Regional parties thrive when authority in a nation-state rests with provincial or state governments. The success of political parties therefore depends on which level of government voters credit for policy outcomes. National political parties win votes during periods when political and economic authority rests with the national government, and lose votes to regional and provincial parties when political or economic authority gravitates to lower levels of government.
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.
