New Parties In Government

Party literature is largely focused on the rise and success of new parties and their effects on party systems and older parties. This book, on the other hand, provides a valuable and original addition to such literature by analyzing what happens to a party when it enters government for the first time. Leading contributors assess how these parties, whether old or new, change when entering government by answering a set of questions: How and why has their role changed? What are the consequences of change? What explains the evolution from principled opposition to loyal opposition and eventually to participation in the executive? Which characteristics of the parties can be held responsible? Which characteristics of the parties' context should be brought into the picture? What have been the effects of the status change on party organization, party ideology and electoral results? Covering a wide range of European parties such as the Finish Greens, right wing parties (FN, Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale) and new parties in Italy , The Netherlands and Sweden to name a few; this book will be of particular interest to scholars and students concerned with party systems, political parties and comparative politics.

This volume is a unique exploration of European political parties making the move towards government for the first time.

Party and Government is an eleven-country study of the relationship between the governments of liberal democracies, mainly from Western Europe, but also including the United States and India, and the parties which support these governments. It examines this relationship at the three levels at which governments and parties connect: appointments, policy-making, and patronage. The emphasis is on a two-way relationship: parties influence governments but governments also influence parties. The extent and the direction of this influence varies from country to country. In some cases, governments and parties are almost autonomous from each other, as in the United States; in other cases, on the contrary, there is considerable power of one over the other: sometimes the party dominates, sometimes the government.

This study presents comparative analyses of the process of party governance, from formation and duration to performance. It compares both the developments in the Eastern and Western part of Europe and uses different types of methods and data are used for comparative analysis.

Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. The General Editors are Professor Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin and Kenneth Newton, University of Southampton and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin . The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. The sister volume to Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, this book offers a systematic and rigorous analysis of parties in some of the world's major new democracies. Drawing on a wealth of expertise and data, the book assesses the popular legitimacy, organizational development and functional performance of political parties in Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe. It demonstrates the generational differences between parties in the old and new democracies, and reveals contrasts among the latter. Parties are shown to be at their most feeble in those recently transitional democracies characterized by personalistic, candidate-centred forms of politics, but in other new democracies - especially those with parliamentary systems - parties are more stable and institutionalized, enabling them to facilitate a meaningful degree of popular choice and control. Wherever party politics is weakly institutionalized, political inequality tends to be greater, commitment to pluralism less certain, clientelism and corruption more pronounced, and populist demagoguery a greater temptation. Without party, democracy's hold is more tenuous.

New material in the fourth edition covers topics such as the return to power of the Liberal Party, voting politics in Quebec, women in Canadian political parties, political campaigning, digital party politics, and municipal party politics.

The Canadian party system is a deviant case among the Anglo-American democracies. Unruly and inscrutable, it is a system that defies logic and classification – until now. In this political science tour de force, Richard Johnston makes sense of the Canadian party system. With a keen eye for history and deft use of recently developed analytic tools, he articulates a series of propositions that underpin the system. For its combination of historical breadth and data-intensive rigour, The Canadian Party System is a rare achievement. Its findings shed light on the main puzzles of the Canadian case, while contesting the received wisdom of the comparative study of parties, elections, and electoral systems elsewhere.

According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and cultural lines. The key to this success is the party system, which allowed for a high degree of collusion and cooptation between political elites, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hidden logic has persisted to this day despite the advent of presidentialism and remains the key to the continuing prosperity of French democracy.