Download Free Challenging Parties Changing Parliaments Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Challenging Parties Changing Parliaments and write the review.

This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives.
This updated edition of Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers Handbook covers the ground of women's access to the legislature in three steps: It looks into the obstacles women confront when entering Parliament be they political, socio-economic or ideological and psychological. It presents solutions to overcome these obstacles, such as changing electoral systems and introducing quotas, and it details strategies for women to influence politics once they are elected to parliament, an institution which is traditionally male dominated. The first Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers handbook was produced as part of IDEA's work on women and political participation in 1998. Since its release in English in 1998, there has been an ongoing interest and demand for the handbook, and responding to the request for the translation of the handbook, IDEA has produced Spanish, French and Indonesian language versions and a Russian overview of the handbook during 2002-2003. Since the first handbook was published, the picture regarding women's political participation has slowly changed. Overall the past decade has seen gradual progress with regard to women's presence in national parliaments. This second edition incorporates relevant global changes in the past years presenting new and updated case studies.--
The Challenges of Intra-Party Democracy provides a comprehensive examination of both the concept and the practice of intra-party democracy (IPD). Acknowledging that IPD is now widely viewed, among both democratic practitioners and scholars, as a normative good, this volume suggests that there is no single, or uniformly preferred, form of IPD. Rather, each party's version of IPD results from a series of choices they make relating to the organization and division of power internally. These decisions reflect many variables including a party's democratic ethos, its electoral context, state regulation and whether or not it is in government. Individual chapters examine the relationship between party models and IPD, the decline in party membership and activism, the role of the state in regulating party democracy, issues relating to gender and party organization, norms of candidate and leadership recruitment and selection, party policy development and party finance. The analysis considers the principal issues that parties (and the state) must consider relating to IPD in each area of party activity, the range of options open to them, current trends in terms of paths chosen, what these choices tell us about parties and, most importantly, what the implications of these choices are. In doing so, we offer a common language and set of questions relating to IPD that enhance the ability for consistent evaluation of the state of internal party democracy. Through thorough analysis of associated costs and benefits, we also provide a framework to assist with considerations of IPD reforms — particularly in terms of their scope, the range of options available and their implications. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, and Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia.
This open access book focuses on the nexus between “party system stability” and “democratic consolidation”, using Slovenia as a case study. Its findings are presented from a comparative perspective to illustrate the commonalities and differences found in research on Central European post-socialist countries and former Yugoslav countries. On the one hand, Slovenia’s characteristics (including the characteristics of its transition to democracy) are far more similar to those of Central European post-socialist countries than Western Balkan countries. On the other, Slovenia shares some similarities with other parts of the former Yugoslavia – especially its experiences with the political system of socialist self-management, elements of a market economy under socialism, and war following the end of socialism (albeit the conflict in Slovenia was very short and rather mild in comparison to those in other parts of socialist Yugoslavia). Slovenia’s experiences with rapid but limited democratic backsliding under the Janša government (March 2019–June 2022) were halted by the 2022 national election – in contrast to the more widely known cases of Hungary and Poland, where such backsliding took place incrementally over a longer period of time that included several election cycles. Danica Fink-Hafner is Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
While primary elections are most often associated with presidential candidates in the United States, similar methods for selecting party leaders and candidates are becoming increasingly common in parliamentary democracies around the world. The Promise and Challenge of Party Primary Elections introduces the first comprehensive examination of both the concept and the practice of primary elections outside of the United States. By offering a clear definition of primary elections and examples of their types, the authors deliver the tools needed for comparative analysis within and across diverse party systems. Focusing their attention on Canada and Israel - two early adopters of primary elections - the authors unveil the most pressing challenges of conducting internal elections, including questions of financing, monitoring and oversight, and the recruitment of new party members. At the same time, the book highlights the democratic benefits of primaries through direct and widespread participation in internal party decision making. Drawing upon the experience of parties with a long history of primary elections, The Promise and Challenge of Party Primary Elections offers valuable lessons and insights for parties around the world in search of more open and inclusive democratic practices.
Parliamentary democracy is the most common regime type in the contemporary political world, but the quality of governance depends on effective parliamentary oversight and strong political parties. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy. In recent years, however, critics have suggested that new challenges such as weakened popular attachment, the advent of cartel parties, the judicialization of politics, and European integration have threatened the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region. This volume examines these claims and their implications. The authors find that the Nordic states have moved away from their previous resemblance to a Westminster model toward a form of parliamentary democracy with more separation-of-powers features—a Madisonian model. These features are evident both in vertical power relations (e.g., relations with the European Union) and horizontal ones (e.g., increasingly independent courts and central banks). Yet these developments are far from uniform and demonstrate that there may be different responses to the political challenges faced by contemporary Western democracies.
Political party organizations play large roles in democracies, yet their organizations differ widely, and their statutes change much more frequently than constitutions or electoral laws. How do these differences, and these frequent changes, affect the operation of democracy? This book seeks to answer these questions by presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of party organization in nineteen contemporary democracies. Using a unique new data collection, the book's chapters test propositions about the reasons for variation and similarities across party organizations. They find more evidence of within-country similarity than of cross-national patterns based on party ideology. After exploring parties' organizational differences, the remaining chapters investigate the impact of these differences. The volume considers a wide range of theories about how party organization may affect political life, including the impact of party rules on the selection of female candidates, the links between party decision processes and the stability of party programmes, the connection between party finance sources and public trust in political parties, and whether the strength of parties' extra-parliamentary organization affects the behaviour of their elected legislators. Collectively these chapters help to advance comparative studies of elections and representation by inserting party institutions and party agency more firmly into the centre of such studies. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
Gender serves as a lens that makes visible important issues in the field of representation: Whom do elected politicians represent? What is at stake in the parliamentary process? What do we know about the interplay between parliaments and the everyday lives of citizens? It is widely understood that women’s presence in government matters but we need to understand the conditions under which it matters more clearly. Using Sweden as a case study, a country where the number of women elected to the national parliament has steadily risen since the 1970s, Lena Wängnerud presents a novel approach on which characteristics inside a parliament help translate physical representation into substantive representation for women. Using three guiding principles: (i) the implementation of equal opportunities for women and men to influence internal parliamentary working procedures; (ii) the creation of room for women’s interests and concerns on the political agenda; and (iii) the production of gender-sensitive legislation, Wängnerud shows what are the necessary conditions for women’s needs, interests, and concerns to be adequately integrated into parliamentary processes. The Principles of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments book adds fuel to all these classical debates within the field of political representation and will bring attention to a wider audience on why electing women matters.
The "secret garden of politics", where some win and others lose their candidate selection bids, and why some aspirant candidates are successful while others fail have been enduring puzzles within political science. This book solves this puzzle by proposing and applying a universally applicable multistage approach to discover the relationship between selection rules, selectors’ biases, aspirants’ attributes, and selection outcomes. Rare party and survey data on winning and losing candidates and insider views on what it takes to win a selection contest at multiple selection stages are compared and used to reveal the inner workings of the secret garden. With a primary focus on the British Labour party over several elections, the findings challenge many long-held assumptions about why some aspirant candidate types are successful over others and provides real-world and controversial solutions to addressing women’s and other marginalised groups’ descriptive underrepresentation. As such, it provides a much-needed fresh look at party selection processes and draws new conclusions as to why political underrepresentation occurs and should inform policies to remedy it. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of gender and ethnicity in politics, political parties and candidate selection, and more broadly to the study of political elites, comparative politics, sociology, labour studies, gender, race, and disability studies, and to practitioners.