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This book examines the changes in the career experiences and profiles of 350 European prime ministers in 26 European democracies from 1945 to 2020. It builds on a theoretical framework, which claims that the decline of party government along with the increase of populism, technocracy, and the presidentialization of politics have influenced the careers of prime ministers over the past 70 years. The findings show that prime ministers’ career experiences became less political and more technical. Moreover, their career profiles shifted from a traditional type of ‘party-agent’ to a new type of ‘party-principal’. These changes affected the recruitment of executive elites and their political representation in European democracies, albeit with different intensity and speed.
This book examines the effects of personnel turnover in European Union institutions. Individuals enter and exit EU institutions with remarkable frequency, and questions involving institutional personnel lie at the heart of populist and feminist critiques of the EU. Are these critiques accurate? How do personnel dynamics affect the EU’s legitimacy? Will changing patterns of turnover help to redeem the EU? Personnel Turnover addresses these issues by considering turnover’s effects on three aspects of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output). Authors use a common framework to explore various questions: Does turnover affect the ways that EU citizens see the EU or the likelihood that citizens will participate in EU elections? Does turnover affect the efficiency of the EU decision-making or the EU’s ability to promote its interests abroad? In tackling these contemporary subjects, the authors throw light on a classical question—what difference does it make when political leaders are replaced?
This Handbook provides definitive reference work on political executives and their key role in political systems. It records the current theoretical and methodological debates and sets the agenda for future research in this prominent and extremely wide-ranging field of research.
This book provides an appreciation of the work of renowned scholar Richard Rose. Over a career spanning more than six decades, Rose has explored a vast range of subjects related to British, American and comparative politics. His work, however, has always been concerned with an underlying theme: governing modern societies in changing times. Celebrating Rose's career which has shaped postwar political science in decisive ways, this volume examines issues, debates and lines of research stimulated by his work. Chapters are organized thematically under five headings central to his research: parties and elections, political institutions, public policy, governing at multiple levels, and trust and legitimacy. The book demonstrates that politics cannot be reduced to economics, the actions of individuals, predictive science or functional determinism, but has its own logic and modes of justification. It will appeal to scholars and students of politics, public policy and governance.
This book offers a systematic and far-reaching account of party system institutionalization in Western Europe. Drawing upon a wide array of data and through a comparison of 20 countries from the end of WWII to 2019 across three arenas of party competition (electoral, parliamentary, and governmental ones), the empirical analysis shows that, over the past decade, the level of institutionalization in the Western European party systems has dramatically declined compared with previous decades. Electoral, parliamentary, and – in some cases – governmental instability and unpredictability have reached record-high levels. Although the impact of the 2008 Great Recession has certainly worked as a c...
It is difficult for Italians to have much faith in the future. The last Labour Minister said it was a good thing if young people emigrated, to stop them 'getting under our feet'; one recent Prime Minister said that young Italians should not invest their hopes in securing a stable job, for that would be 'boring', anyway. Examining Italy's history since the end of the Cold War, Italy is the Future argues that its dismal situation should not be understood in terms of a stereotyped narrative of Italian chaos or backwardness. In a country that could once boast Europe's strongest Left, Italy today epitomises the crisis of democracy in the West. The scandals of Silvio Berlusconi's rule, the pervasi...
This book studies such governments, covering the full life-cycle of coalitions from the formation of party alliances before elections to coalition formation after elections.
Coalition government among different political parties is the way most European democracies are governed. Traditionally, the study of coalition politics has been focused on Western Europe. Coalition governance in Central Eastern Europe brings the study of the full coalition life-cycle to a region that has undergone tremendous political transformation, but which has not been studied from this perspective. The volume covers Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It provides information and analyses of the coalition life-cycle, from pre-electoral alliances to coalition formation and portfolio distribution, governing in coaliti...
This volume is the first comprehensive analysis of women's ascendance to leadership positions in the European Union as well as their performance in such positions. It provides a new theoretical and analytical framework capturing both positional and behavioural leadership and the specific hurdles that women encounter on their path to and when exercising leadership. The volume encompasses a detailed set of single and comparative case studies, analyzing women's representation and performance in the core EU institutions and their individual pathways to and exercise of power in top-level functions, as well as comparative analyses regarding the position and behaviour of women in relation to men. B...
Political parties are nothing without their people and candidates are essential to parties' core functions - contesting elections, filling political offices, and shaping policy. Candidates are the literal 'face' of parties, yet they are not wedded to them permanently: candidates can enter or leave politics, switch parties, move along or stay behind when parties split or merge. Even in parties that look stable, candidate change happens below the surface, ultimately altering what the parties stand for. Inspired by evolutionary theories, Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution conceptualizes candidates as 'party genes' and develops a candidate-based approach to party evolution. Tracking ca...