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A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. This essential text is divided into three clear parts: Part I introduces the study, themes and methodology Part II deals in depth with the wide range of issues involved in estimating and analyzing the policy positions of key political actors. Part III is the key data section that identifies key policy dimensions across the 47 countries, detailing their party positions and median legislators, and is complemented by graphical representations of each party system. This book is an invaluable reference for all political scientists, particularly those interested in party policy and comparative politics.
"Provides major new insights into the changing electoral strategies of political parties in Western democracies".--Ronald Ingelhart, University of Michigan.
​​Given the centrality of political parties in modern democracies, most research on these systems either directly address their internal functioning and activities or question their critical role. Political science has moved from describing institutions to the thorough analysis of behavior within these institutions and the interactions between them. The inevitable consequences of the maturing and institutionalization of the discipline of political science in many countries include the forming of sub-fields and specialized research communities. At the same time the number of democracies has vastly increased since the 1980s and although not each attempt at democratization was eventually successful, more heterogeneous systems with some form of party competition exist than ever before. As a consequence, the literature addressing the large issues of party democracy spreads over many research fields and has become difficult to master for individual students of party democracy and party governance. The present volume sets out to review the behavior and larger role of political parties in modern democracies. In so doing the book takes its departure from the idea that the main contribution of political parties to the working of democracy is their role as vehicles of political competition in systems of government. Consequently the focus is not merely in the internal functioning of political parties, but rather their behavior the electoral, legislative, and governmental arenas. Thus several chapters address how political parties perform within the existing institutional frameworks. One more chapter looks at the role of political parties in building and adapting these institutions. Finally, two chapters explicitly address the party contributions to democracy in established and new democracies, respectively.​​
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Comprehensive, enlightening, and terrifyingly timely.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Time • Foreign Affairs • WBUR • Paste Donald Trump’s presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we’d be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang—in a revolution or military coup—but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved. Praise for How Democracies Die “What we desperately need is a sober, dispassionate look at the current state of affairs. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two of the most respected scholars in the field of democracy studies, offer just that.”—The Washington Post “Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.”—Ezra Klein, Vox “If you only read one book for the rest of the year, read How Democracies Die. . . .This is not a book for just Democrats or Republicans. It is a book for all Americans. It is nonpartisan. It is fact based. It is deeply rooted in history. . . . The best commentary on our politics, no contest.”—Michael Morrell, former Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (via Twitter) “A smart and deeply informed book about the ways in which democracy is being undermined in dozens of countries around the world, and in ways that are perfectly legal.”—Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Explores ways to make democracy work better, with particular focus on the integral role of local institutions.
How do democracies form and what makes them die? Daniel Ziblatt revisits this timely and classic question in a wide-ranging historical narrative that traces the evolution of modern political democracy in Europe from its modest beginnings in 1830s Britain to Adolf Hitler's 1933 seizure of power in Weimar Germany. Based on rich historical and quantitative evidence, the book offers a major reinterpretation of European history and the question of how stable political democracy is achieved. The barriers to inclusive political rule, Ziblatt finds, were not inevitably overcome by unstoppable tides of socioeconomic change, a simple triumph of a growing middle class, or even by working class collective action. Instead, political democracy's fate surprisingly hinged on how conservative political parties - the historical defenders of power, wealth, and privilege - recast themselves and coped with the rise of their own radical right. With striking modern parallels, the book has vital implications for today's new and old democracies under siege.
Political parties are one of the core institutions of democracy. But in democracies around the world—rich and poor, Western and non-Western—there is growing evidence of low or declining public confidence in parties. In membership, organization, and popular involvement and commitment, political parties are not what they used to be. But are they in decline, or are they simply changing their forms and functions? In contrast to authors of most previous works on political parties, which tend to focus exclusively on long-established Western democracies, the contributors to this volume cover many regions of the world. Theoretically, they consider the essential functions that political parties perform in democracy and the different types of parties. Historically, they trace the emergence of parties in Western democracies and the transformation of party cleavage in recent decades. Empirically, they analyze the changing character of parties and party systems in postcommunist Europe, Latin America, and five individual countries that have witnessed significant change: Italy, Japan, Taiwan, India, and Turkey. As the authors show, political parties are now only one of many vehicles for the representation of interests, but they remain essential for recruiting leaders, structuring electoral choice, and organizing government. To the extent that parties are weak and discredited, the health of democracy will be seriously impaired. Contributors: Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther • Hans Daalder • Philippe Schmitter • Seymour Martin Lipset • Giovanni Sartori • Bradley Richardson • Herbert Kitschelt • Michael Coppedge • Ergun Ozbudun • Yun-han Chu • Leonardo Morlino • Ashutosh Varshney and E. Sridharan • Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair.
This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives.
How popular democracy has paradoxically eroded trust in political systems worldwide, and how to restore confidence in democratic politics In recent decades, democracies across the world have adopted measures to increase popular involvement in political decisions. Parties have turned to primaries and local caucuses to select candidates; ballot initiatives and referenda allow citizens to enact laws directly; many places now use proportional representation, encouraging smaller, more specific parties rather than two dominant ones.Yet voters keep getting angrier.There is a steady erosion of trust in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions, culminating most recently in major populist victories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Frances Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro argue that devolving power to the grass roots is part of the problem. Efforts to decentralize political decision-making have made governments and especially political parties less effective and less able to address constituents’ long-term interests. They argue that to restore confidence in governance, we must restructure our political systems to restore power to the core institution of representative democracy: the political party.
The Presidentialization of Politics 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 which 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 which 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 which 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 by-pass 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-centred electoral processes. The book presents evidence for this process of presidentialization for 14 modern democracies (including the US 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.