Comparative Politics

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. It focuses on three major aspects of change in two-party systems: why occasionally major parties collapse; why collapsed parties sometimes survive as minor parties, and sometimes do not; and what determines why, and how, major parties will ally themselves with minor parties in order to maximize their chances of winning. With respect to the first aspect it is argued that major parties are advantaged by two factors: the resources they have accumulated already, and their occupying role similar to that called by Thomas Schelling a ‘focal arbiter’. Consequently, party collapse is rare. When it has occured in nation states it is the result of a major party having to fight opposition on ‘two separate fronts’. The survival of a collapsed party depends largely on its internal structure; when a party has linked closely the ambitions of politicians at different levels of office, party elimination is more likely. The main arena in which agency is significant – when leadership is possible, including the politician acting as heresthetician – is in the building of alliances with minor parties. This is necessary for maximizing the chances of a party winning, but, for various reasons, coalitions are usually difficult to construct.

Quality mass education is one of sustainable development’s most important ingredients, particularly in the information age. This book provides a framework for understanding and predicting when a government will invest in it. It shows that the key factors are not those that social scientists or the public typically rely on to understand government policymaking decisions: a government cannot be expected to invest in mass education when the economy needs it, when the culture values it, nor, most surprising for political scientists, when its leaders are elected democratically. Instead, the book shows that the government will invest in mass education in two specific conditions. The first is an economy where skilled labor is scarce, skilled wages are flexible, and employers cannot hire foreign skilled workers. The second is a government engaging in “political entrepreneurship of the poor” by developing organizational structures that allow poor citizens to act collectively and credibly support the government. These two conditions determine whether it is in the government’s self-interest to invest in mass education. The book examines a half century of educational development in Taiwan, Ghana, and Brazil—three countries with little in common. The two conditions reliably forecast whether governments in each country provided quality mass education or concentrated on higher education restricted to elites. The framework also explains many of the specific features of the education systems each government produces: for example, whether teachers are paid well and the prevalence of fees, financial aid, and private sector involvement in education.

The book proposes a unifying conception which shows that the differences between ‘majoritarian’, ‘consensus’ and other forms of representative democracy are superficial compared to what unites them. The common element is the empowerment of the median voter by making the party (s)he votes for the median party in the legislature. Comparative evidene covering 21 democracies from 1950-1995 is assembled to check out the descriptive credentials of this idea, in contrast to the government mandate which forms the normal description and justification of democracy as providing ‘a necessary link between popular preferences and public policy’. Although, spontaneous majorities rarely emerge, median voter - median party correspondences do (72% of all governments, 82% under PR). Policy correspondence, distortion, long term bias, and responsiveness are examined in both static and dynamic terms. They reveal that underneath short-term fluctuations, the long-term equilibrium positions of governments and median voters map each other closely. Many other questions about democracy are also raised and investigated — economic and retrospective voting (‘ kicking the rascals out’): policy incrementalism, etc. — giving the book an appeal to different groups of specialists in political science. The comparative data on voting, on electoral party and government preferences, and on actual policy outputs are unsurpassed with regards to comprehensiveness over nations and time.

Elections ought in theory to go a long way towards making democracy ‘work’, but in many contexts, they fail to embody democratic ideals because they are affected by electoral manipulation and misconduct. This volume undertakes an analytic and explanatory investigation of electoral malpractice, which is understood as taking three principal forms: manipulation of the rules governing elections, manipulation of vote preference formation and expression, and manipulation of the voting process. The study — which is comparative in nature — starts out by providing a conceptual definition and typology of electoral malpractice, before considering evidence for the causes of this phenomenon. The principal argument of the book is that factors affecting the costs of electoral malpractice are crucial in determining whether leaders will, in any given context, seek to rig elections. Among the most important factors of this sort are the linkages between elites and citizens, and in particular the balance between relations of the civil-society and clientelist types. These linkages play an important role in determining how much legitimacy leaders will lose by engaging in electoral manipulation, as well as the likely consequences of legitimacy loss. The study also shows how electoral malpractice might be reduced by means of a variety of strategies designed to raise the cost of electoral manipulation by increasing the ability of civil society and international actors to monitor and denounce it.

This book poses two pertinent questions: First, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? Second, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision‐making processes within it? The goal of this book is twofold: First, it identifies key institutional components of an emergent European Executive Order. The nucleus of this Order is the European Commission. The Commission, however, is increasingly supplemented by a mushrooming parallel administration of EU‐level agencies and EU committees. This book provides fresh empirical survey and interview data on the everyday decision‐making behaviour, role perceptions, and identities among European civil servants who participate within these institutions. In addition, this book reveals how an emergent European Executive Order profoundly penetrates the domestic branch of executive government. Secondly, this book claims and empirically substantiates that an emergent European Executive Order is a compound executive order balancing a limited set of key decision‐making dynamics. One message of this book is that an emergent European Executive Order consists of a compound set of supranational, departmental, epistemic, and intergovernmental decision‐making dynamics. Arguably, a compound European Executive Order transforms the inherent Westphalian order to the extent that intergovernmentalism is transcended and supplemented by a multidimensional mix of supranational, departmental, and/or epistemic dynamics. This book also theoretically explores conditions under which these decision‐making dynamics gain prevalence. It is argued that the decision‐making dynamics evolving within an emergent European Executive Order is conditioned by the formal organization of its composite parts and by the social interaction patterns that emerge among the civil servants. Political processes and political systems can neither be adequately understood nor explained without including the organization dimension(s) of executive orders.

For many years, there has been an intense debate over the importance of social class as a basis of political partisanship and ideological divisions in advanced industrial societies. The arguments of postmodernists and disillusioned socialists have been combined with those of numerous empirical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both sociology and political science—who have claimed that class inequality has lost its political importance. Yet at the same time, the class politics proselytizers—whether Marxist or otherwise—have remained unpersuaded. This book presents a state‐of‐the‐art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross‐national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion.

The strengths of the book are the following: (1)a combination of breadth and depth, which uses both comparative analysis of up to 16 countries and detailed analyses of several of the more critical cases; (2) methodological sophistication: a particularly high quality is attained in the measurement of class and voting, and in the statistical analysis of their relations through time; (3) an interchange of skills and knowledge from political science, social stratification research, and the sociology of politics; and (4) an international collection of established and in some cases extremely eminent contributors.

On the basis of the evidence presented, it is argued that in many cases class divisions in voting have not declined. Much of current orthodoxy among both political scientists and sociologists with regard to the declining class basis of politics is brought into question by the ’The End of Class Politics?’. This should enable it to serve as a major reference point for future work and discussion on the social bases of political divisions.

The readership includes both sociologists, primarily in the areas of political sociology and stratification and political scientists. As an authoritative research statement it would appeal to practitioners, graduate classes, and advanced undergraduate courses. It would also be useful for advanced research methods teaching, as it would provide a more effective demonstration of the relation between methods and substance than do texts that teach methods per se. The inclusion of three chapters looking at the US, both as a case study and in cross‐national context, make it relevant to an American as well as European audience.

It is frequently claimed that, as a result of the institutionalization of environmentalism in the years following its rapid rise in the 1970s and 1980s, the environmental movement has been demobilized, and that once radical groups have been incorporated into the web of policy‐making and consultation and have moderated their tactics to the point that lobbying and partnerships have displaced protest. Such claims were, however, based on casual observation and anecdote rather than systematic investigation of the incidence of protest, and during the 1990s, in several western European countries, the conventional wisdom was challenged by a resurgence of environmental protest that was sometimes markedly more confrontational than that of the 1980s. To determine whether there had indeed been a decline or deradicalization of protest, protest event analysis was undertaken of the environmental protests reported in one quality newspaper in each of eight countries–Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the Basque Country – during the 10 years 1988–97. No universal or monotonic decline of environmental protests was apparent during the decade, with reported protests declining and becoming less confrontational in some countries, but rising and becoming more confrontational in others. Most reported environmental protest was moderate and nondisruptive throughout the decade, and violent action remained rare. It was expected that opportunities created by the increased environmental competence of the European Union would produce a Europeanization of environmental protest, but there was no evidence of any increase in the proportions of protest mobilized on the level of, stimulated by, or targeted at the European Union and its institutions, all of which remained at very low levels in all of the countries. Nor was there evidence of Europeanization of environmental protest in the shape of convergence of national patterns of the incidence of protest. The patterns of the incidence of protest varied considerably and remained nationally idiosyncratic, with considerable cross‐national variations in the issues and the forms of protest tending to persist over time. Protest event methodology encounters problems of selection bias associated with cycles of media attention, and so, in the attempt better to understand these biases and their impact upon the pattern of reported protest, journalists and editors associated with the production of those reports were interviewed. On the basis of a protest event analysis of newspaper reports during a decade in which environmental protest was no longer novel, this investigation concludes that there is little or no evidence of the demobilization of environmentalism, and some that the institutionalization of environmental activism may be self‐limiting.