Books in the Comparative Politics series

Campaign organizers and the media appear to agree that voters' perceptions of party leaders have an important impact in elections.Platform or Personality? examines voters' evaluations of party leaders in elections around the world and finds that leaders have an unmistakeable and consistent impact on voters' decisions at the ballot box

This analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies exploring both coalitional and single-party countries and governments.

Three unprecedented large-scale democratic experiments have taken place in which groups of randomly selected ordinary citizens were asked to independently design the next electoral system. The lessons drawn from the research are relevant for those interested in political participation, public opinion, deliberation, public policy, and democracy

Why do some countries appear to be far more centralized than others? This book examines the relationships between national and local government in Britain, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Spain.

Politics at the Centre studies the ways in which political parties select and remove their leaders in five parliamentary democracies: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. It addresses the subject through cross national comparison of 25 parties in these countries from 1965 to the present day.

Robert Elgie examines the relationship between semi-presidentialism and democratic performance. There are over 50 countries with a semi-presidential constitution. This book shows that the president-parliamentary sub-type is more likely to be associated with a poorer democratic performance than its premier-presidential counterpart.

Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World addresses a question at the heart of contemporary global politics: how does one craft democracy in fragile and divided states? By bringing new evidence and arguments to bear on the topic of promoting democracy this book contributes to both foreign policy and academic debates.

The Politics of Party Funding analyses an increasingly popular institutional choice-the introduction of state funding to political parties-and represents a first step towards a theory which explains differences and similarities in party funding regimes.

This book investigates changing relations between parties and their members in four major British and German political parties. By calling attention to the varied benefits members can provide for parties even in a mass-media age, this account helps to explain why some party leaders have been willing to back recent expansions of intra-party democracy.

This pioneering book presents a new approach to understanding political parties, sheds light on their inner workings and offers the first comprehensive analysis of the way parties choose their candidates for public office. Candidate selection is, after all, the function that separates parties from other organizations.

Based on extensive data sets from national election studies in nine major democracies, this book brings together leading experts to assess the impact of political leaders on voting patterns. This is the first major book-length treatment of the importance of leaders' personality on the outcome of democratic elections.

Linking Citizens and Parties highlights the pathways through which citizens' political preferences are expressed by their political parties.

This book is the sequel to Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford 2002). It offers a systematic and rigorous analysis of parties in some of the world's major new democracies, focusing on Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe.

How does representative democracy work in the modern age? Examining 21 post-war democracies, this strikingly innovative approach by two world-class scholars demonstrates how the voter in the middle - the median elector - empowers the centre party in parliament to translate political preferences into public policy.

East Asia is one of the most dynamic areas of political change in the world today-what role do citizens play in these processes of change? Drawing upon a unique set of coordinated public opinion surveys conducted by the World Values Survey, this book provides a dramatically new image of the political cultures of East Asia.

Losers' Consent shows how being able to accept losing is one of the central requirements of democracy, and provides a major new contribution to our understanding of political legitimacy, comparative political behaviour, and democratic stability.

Stein Rokkan was one of the leading social scientists of the post-war world. He was a prolific writer whose main contribution to social science - the conceptual and developmental map of Europe - is presented here for the first time in an integrated and systematic way.

This book examines the role played by the parties themselves in two-party systems. It rejects the argument that the behaviour of the parties is determined largely by social forces or by the supposed logic of the electoral market. Instead, it shows that both structure and agency can matter.

This indispensable introduction to the institutions, practices, and consequences of boundary delimitation around the world brings together some of the world's leading specialists on redistricting.

This book contributes to a better understanding of relations between social and political change, and the importance of institutional factors in shaping the political elites of European democracies. It helps to substantiate theoretical debates in the social and political sciences on issues such as historical institutionalism and path dependency.

Is the performance of western democracies in decline? Which countries show the best performance? What type of democracy works best? This book offers a comprehensive analysis of twenty-one OECD countries, examining the major domestic policy areas - domestic security policy, economic policy, social policy, and environmental policy.

This is the first systematically comparative study of environmental protest in a representative cross-section of EU member states. It breaks entirely new ground in the study of environmental politics in Europe and is a major contribution to the study of protest events.

This is the first book-length comparison of the dynamics of electoral behaviour across a wide range of European countries over the past forty years. Leading scholars come together to assess how voting patterns have changed in six established democracies: Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

Leading experts come together to examine the changing role of political parties and political leadership in fourteen modern democracies.

This volume brings together some of the foremost scholars of European party politics to discuss the challenges currently faced by western European political parties. Each contributor provides a concise, critical review of the theoretical and methodological 'state of the art' in respect of a specific aspect, and also reviews the latest empirical findings in that area.

This is the first systematically comparative study of environmental protest in a representative cross-section of EU member states. It breaks entirely new ground in the study of environmental politics in Europe and is a major contribution to the study of protest events.

Long-term changes in parliamentary recruitment and patterns of political careers are studied in eleven European countries from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the millennium. These transformations are traced on the basis of an integrated data-set (the DATACUBE).

This text studies the actual behaviour of some 400 governments in 20 post-World War II democracies, including those of Western Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan and New Zealand. It concludes that parties do in fact function in accordance with modern democratic theory.

Is it self-interest or public interest that dominates Western politics? The author examines more than 200 studies of democracy in action from 17 countries and argues that the prevalent theory that egoism rules simply does not match the facts.

An analysis of the roles that political parties perform in 20 OECD nations. The text finds that parties continue to exercise their traditional roles in organizing elections and structuring the government process, but they are losing the allegiance of a public that is increasingly non-partisan and sceptical about political parties as institutions.