Summary
Contents
Subject index
Changes since the last edition: • The previous edition didn't quite fit modules on either comparative politics or voters and elections. The new edition is more closely mapped to modules on the latter. • New chapters on authoritarian elections and regime change, and electoral integrity. • Re-inclusion of a chapter on voting behaviour. • Stronger focus on the economy.
Parties and Party Systems
Parties and Party Systems
From the time of their inception, parties in mass democracies have been disdained by intellectuals – famously by Mosei Ostrogorski (1902) and Robert Michels (1915) – as well as viewed with great skepticism by public opinion, particularly in times of economic hardship and deep political division. At the core, there is the suspicion that party politicians, as the voters’ “agents,” never have the interests of their “principals,” the citizens, in mind, but primarily their own pursuit of power and office. In the early twenty-first century, disenchantment with parties appears to have reached new peaks across most democracies around the world. Yet parties have proved indispensable because they solve problems of collective action and interest aggregation that ...
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