Summary
Contents
Subject index
How have Europe's mainstream political parties responded to the long-term decline in voter loyalties? What are the consequences of this change in the electoral markets in which parties now operate? Popular disengagement, disaffection, and withdrawal on the one hand, and increasing popular support for protest parties on the other, have become the hallmarks of modern European politics. This book provides an excellent account of how political parties in Western Europe are perceiving and are responding to these contemporary challenges of electoral dealignment. Each chapter employs a common format to present and compare the changing strategies of established parties and party systems in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland. The result is an invaluable portrait of the changing electoral environment and how parties are interacting with each another and voters today. Political Parties and Electoral Change is essential reading for anybody seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary electoral politics and of the challenges facing west European party systems. Peter Mair is Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University. Wolfgang C. M ller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim and previously taught at the University of Vienna. Fritz Plasser is Professor of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.
Ephemeral Victories? France's Governing Parties, the Ecologists, and the Far Right
Ephemeral Victories? France's Governing Parties, the Ecologists, and the Far Right
Political markets, like any markets, can be rigged. Katz and Mair's model of the cartel party outlines how it can be done. Cartel parties, they argue, monopolize government office and use its perquisites to reinforce and perpetuate their ascendancy. Colluding with each other out of ‘a mutual interest in collective organizational survival’, they seek ‘to place barriers in the path of new parties seeking to enter the system’ (Katz and Mair 1995: 19–20, 23). And yet, admit Katz and Mair (1996: 532), ‘there are no fully fledged cartel parties’: messy empirical observation fails to live up to the clarity either of this archetype or ...
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