Faces on the Ballot

the personalization of electoral systems in Europe

One of the key shifts in contemporary politics is the trend towards greater personalization. Collective actors such as political parties are losing relevance. Citizens are slowly dealigning from these actors, and individual politicians are therefore growing in importance in elections, in government, within parties, and ...

New parties in old party systems

persistence and decline in seventeen democracies

New Parties in Old Party Systems addresses a pertinent yet neglected issue in comparative party research: why are some new parties that enter national parliament able to defend a niche on the national level, while other fail to do so? Unlike most existing studies, which ...

The politics of party funding

state funding to political parties and party competition in Western Europe

Recently there has been a convergence of party funding regimes across many states of Western Europe. The driving force behind this process has been the introduction of state funding to political parties. This book subsequently asks why state funding to political parties has been introduced ...

The dynamics of two-party politics

party structures and the management of competition

This book examines the role played by the parties themselves in two- party systems. It rejects the argument that the behaviour of the parties is determined largely by social forces or by the supposed logic of the electoral market. Instead, it shows that both structure ...

Intergovernmental cooperation

rational choices in federal systems and beyond

Over the past decades, governments have increasingly been confronted with problems that transcend their boundaries. A multitude of policy fields are affected, including environment, trade and security. Responding to the challenges triggered by Europeanization and globalization, governments increasingly interact across different spheres of authority. Both ...

Democratic representation in Europe

diversity, change and convergence

Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change and convergence explores representation as a core element of democracies in the modern era. Over the past 150 years parliamentary representation has developed into a main link between polity and society, and parliamentary representatives have come to form the ...

The presidentialization of politics

a comparative study of modern democracies

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 ...

Environmental protest in Western Europe

The rise of environmentalism has been one of the more remarkable developments in the politics of western societies in recent decades. However, as environmental awareness has become more generalized, the forms of expression of environmental concern have changed. Established environmental movement organizations have become embedded ...

Losers' consent

elections and democratic legitimacy

The presidentalization of politics

a comparative study of modern democracies

In this major new work, leading experts come together to examine the changing role of political parties and political leadership in fourteen modern democracies. As well as examining cross-national differences, The Presidentialization of Politics analyses how modern democracies are increasingly following a presidential logic of ...

Political parties

Old concepts and new challenges

Several of the world's leading scholars present critical analyses (both conceptual and empirical) of important substantive themes on political parties in contemporary democracies. They critically re-examine the classic concepts and typologies that have guided research in this field over the past decades, and explore ...

Political parties in advanced industrial democracies

How relevant and vital are political parties in contemporary democracies? Do they fulfill the functions that any stable and effective democracy might expect of them, or are they little more than moribund anachronisms, relics of a past age of politicallife, now superseded by other mechanisms ...

Political parties in the new Europe

Political and Analytical Challenges.

This volume brings together some of the foremost scholars of European party politics to discuss the challenges currently faced by western European political parties. Each contributor provides a concise, critical review of the theoretical and methodological 'state of the art' in respect of a specific ...