Suchergebnisse

An examination of the multi-party system in Israel and to a large extent also in France during the last two decades reveals the emergence of three distinct types of party clusters. These approximate to a limited extent to Kirchheimer's catch-all thesis, but reveal motives and conditions other than those he postulated. The party clusters are distinguished as Conglomerate Blocs, Proportionally Amalgamated Parties and Unitary Amalgamated Parties. An analysis of the party systems in at least these two countries show the conditions likely to foster the formation of such party configurations, their modes of operation, and the internal stresses they generate.

Despite the scepticism that increasingly surrounds their role and standing in contemporary democracies, scholarly interest in political parties continues unabated. But this interest is also proving uneven, with relatively little attention now being given to the study of party systems. More specifically, the level of theoretical interest in party systems remains limited, with almost no substantial innovations being made since the publication of Sartori's classic work of 1976. In this article, we seek to redress some of this neglect by identifying the relevant parameters that can be used in the definition of party systems and, possibly, in the explanation of party system change. We then go on to look at the minimum defining characteristics of a system of parties (as opposed to a set of parties) before finally arguing that party systems are best understood as multidimensional phenomena in which we identify and discuss the implications of three types of division — vertical, horizontal and functional.

Changes in West European party systems can be related to a four-fold typology: imbalance, balance, diffusion, & fragmentation. The extremes of imbalanced & fragmented party systems are no longer represented: West European countries all now tend towards balanced or diffused forms. The balanced type is well represented, & it accords with the pattern of majority government & cohesive opposition. However, several systems show growth in diffusion: seen in the lack of clear polarization & by the rise in the number of parties represented in assemblies. A diffused system imposes quite different conditions for the successful operation of parliamentary government. Thus the occurrence of minority government, as a relatively stable form of rule, implies a high degree of consensus in the political system & requires an amount of overt or disguised interparty cooperation. AA.

Political parties have long been theorized as a key political institution that links society with the formal political system, and thus have often featured prominently in theories of political economy and redistribution. Curiously, however, until recently party systems have received substantially less attention in theories seeking to explain redistribution among both democratic and non-democratic regimes. I build on this nascent literature by conceptualizing the relationship between party systems, inequality, and redistribution, advancing the argument that at least a portion of inequality and income redistribution in any given country is attributable to dynamics within its party system—particularly their structure and institutionalization. Hegemonic party systems can initiate large waves of social reform and redistribution in their formative years but their redistributive prospects significantly wane the longer a hegemonic party remains in power, while two-party systems are unlikely to provide much, if any, alleviation of inequality. Multi-party systems provide the greatest potential to redistribute, but the relationship is conditional on their relative institutionalization. Stable multi-party systems with institutionalized parties are more likely to exhibit both lower levels of inequality and redistribute more income, whereas inchoate counterparts are unlikely to be more redistributive than either hegemonic or two-party systems.

ObjectiveThis article examines the effects of civil wars on the characteristics of postconflict party systems, in terms of fractionalization, whether a dominant party emerges, and party systems stability.MethodsData were collected for 92 developing countries, 44 of which experienced a civil war from 1975 to 2009. Regression and logistic regression analyses are conducted to examine the impact of civil wars, while controlling for a number of other variables.ResultsThis article finds no relationship between civil war and fractionalization, but does find that intense, bloodier civil wars tend to produce party systems that are dominant‐party systems with less electoral volatility than transitional states that did not experience a civil war.ConclusionThese results suggest support for the argument that particularly bloody civil wars are likely to have an especially powerful freezing effect on party systems (and may not lead to fully competitive party politics).

"Do party systems help or hinder democracy in Africa? This collection offers important new insights into the relation between party systems and democracy on the African continent. It presents a comparative analysis of how African party systems influence procedural aspects of democracy such as accountability and government responsiveness and also shows how party systems affect citizens' satisfaction. It paints a vivid picture of the one-party dominant systems in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa and how these impede the deepening of democracy. Drawing lessons from Benin, Ghana and Zambia, it also portrays the fluidity of African party systems and draw attention to the importance of party system change. The insightful contributions show that African party systems affect democracy in ways that are different from the relation between party systems and democracy observed elsewhere"--

Recently Mozaffar etal. [Mozaffar, S., Scarritt, J.R., Galaich, G., 2003. Electoral institutions, ethnopolitical cleavages and party systems in Africa's emerging democracies. American Political Science Review 97, 379-390] presented evidence suggesting that African party systems are somehow different from party systems elsewhere in the world. In doing so, they promoted the common notion of African exceptionalism. We believe that their conclusions are open to question because they draw inferences from a number of multiplicative interaction models in which they do not include all constitutive terms, interpret constitutive terms as unconditional marginal effects, and fail to calculate marginal effects and standard errors over a sufficiently large range of their modifying variables. By correcting these practices, we reach substantively different conclusions. Specifically, we find that African party systems respond to institutional and sociological factors such as district magnitude and ethnic fragmentation in the same way as party systems in more established democracies. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

'Changing Party Systems in Western Europe' edited by David Broughton and Mark Donovan is reviewed.

The field of the comparative study of political party systems has been particularly fortunate to have been the focus of quite a number of substantial scholarly team efforts in recent years. Individual case studies are still appearing that follow Robert A. Dahl's model of the "patterns of opposition." Terms such as "crisis of participation" or Sartori's "extreme pluralism," from the book edited by Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner,2 are widely used in the description of party systems. Even the study of one-party systems and of national integration in developing areas is beginning to settle down to a common terminology that will increasingly allow comparison with the better-explored systems.

Nikolenyi reviews POLITICAL PARTIES AND PARTY SYSTEMS edited by Ajay K. Mehra by D. D. Khanna and Gert Kueck.