Political Parties And Partisanship

Political Parties and Partisanship provides an up-to-date examination of the conceptualizations, causes, and consequences of partisanship in both new and established democracies in Eastern Europe.

Political Parties and Partisanship provides an up-to-date examination of the conceptualizations, causes, and consequences of partisanship in both new and established democracies in Eastern Europe.

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.

Why do people identify with political parties? How stable are those identifications? Stable party systems, with a limited number of parties and mostly stable voter identification with a party, are normally considered significant signals of a steady democracy. In Dynamic Partisanship, Ken Kollman and John E. Jackson study changing patterns of partisanship in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia over the last fifty years in order to disentangle possible reasons for shifting partisanship and party identification. The authors argue that changes in partisanship can be explained by adjustments in voters’ attitudes toward issues or parties; the success or failure of policies advocated by parties; or alterations in parties’ positions on key issues. They contend that, while all three factors contribute, it is the latter, a party changing positions on a chief concern, that most consistently leads voters to or from a particular party. Their approach provides a deeper knowledge of the critical moving parts in democratic politics.

For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics.

Based on cutting-edge global data, the Research Handbook of Political Partisanship argues that partisanship is down, but not out, in contemporary democracies. Engaging with key scholarly debates, from the rise of right-wing partisanship to the effects of digitalization on partisanship, contributions highlight the significance of political partisanship not only in the present but in the future of democracies internationally.

Essay from the year 2007 in the subject Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: Canada and the United States of America have equally developed a form of structural federalism, both use a single-member plurality election system and have similar social and economic class structures. In contrast to the two-party tradition of the US in a presidential system, Canada has developed a multiparty parliamentary system in which the legislative parties are cohesive and disciplined due to the historical influence of British Westminster System. In general party identification has been defined as “an attachment to a party that helps the citizen locate him/herself and others on the political landscape.” The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of shifts in ideological party identification with respect to the significantly different party systems in Canada and the United States, with special focus on the time span between 1984 and 2000. The central question discussed in this paper is whether or not there has been a significant change in partisan ideology in Canada compared to the United States between 1984 and 2000, and whether Canadian Partisans are more volatile compared to their southern counterparts in terms of ideological party identification.

Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science, their governing and electoral functions among the chief concerns of the field. Yet they are often presented as grubby arenas of ambition, or worse. This book is a vigorous defence of their virtues.