Constraints On Party Politics

Political scientists are quite good at predicting ‘optimal’ policy positions that - under the given circumstances - allow parties to get maximal payoffs in terms of policy, office or votes. What we do not know is whether parties are actually able to take these positions or whether they are constrained to do so. This book attempts to narrow this gap. The major argument is that parties do not choose policy positions from scratch and that they cannot freely change their policy platforms. Rather, voters’ lacking perception of changing party platforms and intra-party factors constrain parties when shifting their policy positions. An empirical analysis of party policy shifts in ten Western European democracies shows that these constraints differ across parties and thus affect the parties’ position-taking differently. Considering this variation is important to derive more precise predictions for parties’ policy platforms and for our understanding of party behaviour in general. This book attempts to narrow this gap. The major argument is that parties do not choose policy positions from scratch and that they cannot freely change their policy platforms. Rather, voters’ lacking perception of changing party platforms and intra-party factors constrain parties when shifting their policy positions. An empirical analysis of party policy shifts in ten Western European democracies shows that these constraints differ across parties and thus affect the parties’ position-taking differently. Considering this variation is important to derive more precise predictions for parties’ policy platforms and for our understanding of party behaviour in general.

The Limits of Participation: Members and Leaders in Canada's Reform Party provides an historical account of the Canadian Reform Party, which shattered the established pattern of Canadian party politics in the late twentieth century. Faron Ellis provides an analysis of the party's development as it struggled to build an organization capable of bridging the policy demands of its members with the strategic plans of its leaders. The book examines the party from the perspective of its members by focusing on the opinion structure of activists who helped found Reform, build it into Canada's official opposition, and eventually decommission it in pursuit of power.

Identifying a crisis for representative democracy in Western European party systems, this essential book studies the widening gap between political parties’ ideological economic Left–Right rhetoric. Combining in-depth theoretical analysis with empirical research, it addresses whether political party ideologies are converging or diverging, and whether these changes are initiated by the parties themselves, aligned with voter demand, or forced by economic globalization.

Canadian party politics collapsed in the early 1990s. This book is about that collapse, about the end of a party system, with a unique pattern of party organization and competition, that had governed Canada’s national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics discusses the breakdown of the old party system, the emergence of the Reform Party and the Bloc Québécois, and the fate of the Conservative and New Democratic Parties. It focuses on the internal workings of parties in this new era, examining the role of professionals, new technologies, and local activists. To understand the ambiguities of our current party system, the authors attended local and national party meetings, nomination and leadership meetings, and campaign kick-off rallies. They visited local campaign offices to observe the parties’ grassroots operations and conducted interviews with senior party officials, pollsters, media and advertising specialists, and leader-tour directors. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will interest students of party politics and Canadian political history, as well as general readers eager to make sense of the changes reshaping national politics today.

Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to join or avoid a war? War and Democratic Constraint shows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions—a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media—are present to make timely information accessible. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts. Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq, War and Democratic Constraint links domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.

This review of the funding of political parties has eight principal recommendations: the status quo, with no caps on donations, is unsustainable therefore donations to parties should be limited; there should be measures to prevent breaches to the new regulations; expenditure in general election campaigns should be reduced; controls on expenditure by third parties should be strengthened; there may be an increase in public funding of political parties; this funding should be linked to a measure of public support and should encourage democratic engagement; the public should have better information on the funding of political parties; the Electoral Commission should have the necessary powers to regulate the new funding settlement.

This book examines how parties negotiate coalition deals at the subnational level using the examples of Germany and Spain. In such multi-level settings, parties are present at various negotiation tables often having to make difficult choices about their role in the coalition and the relative merits of being in government over the opposition.

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in normative political theory. Parties have traditionally been studied by political scientists in their organizational features and in relation to the analysis of related topics such as party systems and electoral systems. Little attention, however, was paid until recently to the normative assumptions that underlie partisanship and party politics. Are parties desirable for democratic politics? How should liberal democracies deal with extremist and/or anti-democratic parties? Do religious parties undermine the secular distinction between religion and politics and is that bad for liberal democracies? These are only some of the many questions that political theorists had left unanswered for a long time. The papers in this collection aim to provide a twofold contribution to the normative analysis of partisanship. On the one hand, they aim to offer a first much needed ‘state of the art’ of the existing research in this area. Many of the contributors have already done extensive research on partisanship and their pieces partly reflect their research expertise and individual approaches to this topic. On the other hand, all pieces move beyond the authors’ existing work and represent significant additions to the normative literature on partisanship, thus setting the standards for future research in this area. This book was published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.