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The Personalization of Politics in the European Union
The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, although recent institutional and political developments suggest that such a trend is underway. This book sheds light onto this phenomenon by taking a comprehensive approach to understanding four key dimensions of personalization concerning institutions, media, politics, and citizens. In doing so, it relies on an innovative longitudinal and cross-count...
Parliaments and Legislative Activity
Martin Brunner aims at solving the puzzle of why opposition parties or government backbenchers propose legislation even though the chance to influence policy outcomes in this manner is almost nil. He argues that instead of influencing policies directly most parliamentary bills serve different purposes: They are used in order to signal own policy positions and to show alternatives to government policies. Or they point at topics that rank high on the public agenda but low on the government agenda. They can also be a means for individual Members of Parliament to build up an independent personal profile. Using formal models and comparative empirical evidence from Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom the author shows that parliamentary initiatives of opposition and backbenchers are not simply “much ado about nothing”, but the result of vote-seeking motivations.
When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People
A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken...
Party Personnel Strategies
Key party goals serve to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. This book offers a theory of how political parties assign their elected members -- their personnel -- to specialized legislative committees to serve collective organizational goals, here known as party personnel strategies. Individual party members vary in their personal attributes, such as prior occupation, gender, and local experience. Parties seek to harness the attributes of their members by assigning them to committees where their expertise is relevant, and where they may enhance the party's policy brand. However, under some electoral systems, parties may need to trade-off the harnessing of expertise ...
Party People
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...
Democratic Representation in Multi-level Systems
This comprehensive volume studies the vices and virtues of regionalisation in comparative perspective, including countries such as Belgium, Germany, Spain, and the UK, and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. It follows the entire chain of democratic responsiveness, starting from the translation of citizen preferences into voting behaviour, up to patterns of decision-making and policy implementation. Many European democracies have experienced considerable decentralisation over the past few decades. This book explores the key virtues which may accompany this trend, such as regional-level political authorities performing better in understanding and implementing citizens’ preferences. It also examines how, on the other hand, decentralisation can come at a price, especially since the resulting multi-level structures may create several new obstacles to democratic representation, including information, responsibility and accountability problems. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal West European Politics.
Rules and Allies
Examining more than three hundred elections in over a hundred countries, this book shows when and how states intervene in elections in other countries.
Candidates, Parties and Voters in the Belgian Partitocracy
This book focuses on the triadic relationship between electoral candidates and the two other poles of the delegation and accountability triangle—political parties and voters. The chapters rely mostly on the Belgian Candidate Survey (CCS project), gathering about 2000 candidates belonging to 15 parties represented in Parliament and running for the 2014 federal and regional elections, and the authors’ conclusions serve at answering broad political science questions linked with elite recruitment, party and candidate electoral strategies, personalisation, party cohesion, and descriptive and substantive representation. Its multilevel semi-open electoral system, atypical federal structure, extreme party system fragmentation and volatility make Belgium an exceptionally rich but complex case that offers findings highly relevant to research on candidates in other democracies.
The Politics of Legislative Debates
Legislative debates make democracy and representation work. Political actors engage in legislative debates to make their voice heard to voters. Parties use debates to shore up their brand. This book makes the most comprehensive study of legislative debates thus far, looking at the politics of legislative debates in 33 liberal democracies in Europe, North America and Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The book begins with theoretical chapters focused on the key concepts in the study of legislative debates. Michael Laver, Slapin and Proksch, and Taylor examine the politics of legislative debates in parliamentary and presidential democracies. Subsequently, Goplerud makes a critical revie...
A Just Society for Ireland? 1964-1987
Drawing on interviews with key players and previously unused archival sources, this book offers a fascinating account of a critical period in Fine Gael's history when the party was challenged to define its place in Irish politics.
