Suchergebnisse

The state of poverty in the United States and Western Europe: five theoretical approaches seeking to explain the variance -- The challenge to America -- The historical experience -- Attitudes, beliefs, and values -- System differences as explanations -- The role of political elites -- The role of business elites -- The history of poverty in seven nations to 1900 -- The early history of poverty in the Unites States -- The Dutch historical experience -- The early French and Belgium history of poverty -- The English historical experience -- The historical experience with poverty in Sweden and Germany -- Final observations: the 20th century and today -- The finalization of social reform and anti-poverty legislation in Western Europe and the United States in the 20th century -- Conclusion: what are the prospects? -- Appendix: major references -- Index

The study of party organization has recently re-emphasized the changing nature of party structures and the probable connections of such organizational adaptation to both the changing environment under which parties work and party survival. This study is an empirical effort to precisely describe the conditions of organizational change in local parties and then to assess how this co-varies with their vote. The setting is Amsterdam and the time period 1961-93. The database comprises surveys of the leaders of the major parties undertaken in 1961, 1976 and 1993, focusing on three aspects of party organizational change: social clientele renewal, ideological change, and variations over time in activists' involvement in the local organization. Significant differences are found by party, by time period, and by organizational adaptation component. There does seem to be a linkage for certain parties between adaptive strategies and the increase or decrease in their vote.

Political parties are alliances of socio-economic interest groups. One cannot understand party organizational dynamics in any community without identifying the critical coalitional subgroups of the organization, assessing their relative strengths, and analyzing their ideologies and behaviors. This is a position we elaborated long ago in our 1956 Detroit study of the Republican and Democratic hierarchies (Eldersveld 1964). The effectiveness of party structures in electoral democracies depends on their linkages to the significant socio-economic interest sectors of the electorates whose support they seek to exploit and mobilize in order to acquire, and to remain in, power. Hence, the viability of local party cadres depends greatly on their capacity for adaptation to the changing character of their electorates. By adaptation we mean not only their response in terms of the numerical representation of social interests in precinct cadres, but also the qualitative performance of precinct cadres, and their orientations to party politics, including their ideological commitments. It is most interesting, therefore, to study the changes in party cadres over time, concurrently with observations concerning the social and populational changes in a community. Of course, the focus in this must be not only on the changing social complexion of the party coalitions, but on the relationship of such change to the mobilist role of the party structures--are they continuously effective, are they still relevant, or are they in a state of decline? To try to answer such questions for Detroit, the studies we have conducted from 1956 to the present are of some utility. Periodically we have returned to Detroit to interview a sample of precinct leaders of both major parties; most recently in the fall of 1980, 1982, and 1984. Therefore, we can compare Detroit party cadres of the 1950s and the 1980s--a 30-year perspective.

This article reports the data from studies in four countries (United States, Netherlands, Sweden, and India) on the reasons for initial involvement in party activism and the reasons for continuance in party work. Considerable cross-national uniformity is discovered, although there are differences in level of motivation. In addition, the differences in motivational orientations for certain parties in multi-party, more ideologically conflicted systems, are particularly noted when such systems are compared with two-party and more moderately conflicted systems. The evidence suggests more ideological (purposive) motivations for party activists at the distant right and left extremes of these systems.