"Beginning Research in Political Science takes a learn-by-doing-approach to guide students through all of the steps needed for their own original projects. Each chapter builds from the previous chapter with step-by-step instructions that guide students towards the project's completion. The text features recent data from the World Values Survey and instructional SPSS Statistics software tutorials, along with a variety of features reflecting its consistent pedagogy"--
In this article, Carolyn Forestiere investigates political volatility as a way to explain varying levels of governance across the new democracies of east central Europe. Specifically, legislative and executive volatility are examined. The results suggest that differences in legislative volatility help explain variations in governance, especially during the beginning of a new democracy. Once party systems begin to consolidate, however, differences in executive volatility begin to matter more. A case study of Poland confirms some of Forestiere's conclusions. While the legislative party system has shown some signs of stabilization, executive volatility remains a salient political problem, which over time has led to a steady decline in the quality of governance.
How do party size and ideology matter for executive‐level representation in parliamentary systems? This paper attempts to answer this question by providing and analyzing comparative data on 105 parties across 16 advanced parliamentary democracies. The electoral performance of each party is assessed, alongside the extent of each party's legislative and executive representation over time, from roughly 1945 to 1995. Two main conclusions are derived from the analysis. First, concerning party size, larger parties tend to be overrepresented in government‐level institutions while for smaller parties the evidence is mixed, since almost half of the smaller parties in the data set have never achieved executive‐level representation. Second, concerning party ideology, center parties have been largely overrepresented in executive institutions while left‐wing parties have been the most systematically underrepresented in the 16 countries.¿Qué tanto importan el tamaño del partido y su ideología para la representación a nivel ejecutivo en los sistemas parlamentarios? Este articulo trata de responder esta pregunta al proveer y analizar información comparativa de 105 partidos a través de 16 democracias parlamentarias avanzadas. La actuación de cada partido es evaluada junto al grado de la representación legislativa y ejecutiva a través del tiempo, aproximadamente desde 1945 hasta 1995. Dos conclusiones principales se derivan del análisis. Primero, en relación al tamaño del partido, los partidos grandes tienden a ser sobre‐representados en las instituciones al nivel del gobierno mientras que para partidos más pequeños la evidencia es mixta, ya que casi la mitad de los pequeños partidos en el conjunto de datos nunca han logrado representación a nivel ejecutivo. Segundo, en relación a la ideología, los partidos de centro han sido mayormente sobre‐representados en las instituciones del ejecutivo mientras que los partidos de izquierda han sido los más sistemáticamente sub‐representados en los 16 países.
In this article, I use the Italian case to demonstrate that Kirchheimer's catch-all thesis can be applied in various ways. Unlike parties in many European nations, Italian parties did not undergo a catch-all transformation in the post-war period. However, after the parties and party system were dramatically reformed in the 1990s, some catch-all characteristics — with clarifications — in Italy are in evidence. Specifically, an important distinction needs to be made between what Kirchheimer called a 'catch-all party' and what we may refer to as a 'catch-all bloc'. The catch-all party is a single party that aims to capture as much of the vote as it can, oftentimes by converging its policy preferences on the centre political space. The catch-all bloc is a group of individual parties, catch-all or not, that agrees in advance to collaborate, and behaves, collectively, as a catch-all party. This important distinction helps us understand changes in the Italian party system over time and shows that Kirchheimer's ideas — though modified — still have relevance in modern-day Italian politics.
The individual camps within the new institutionalist paradigm generally argue that every political actor operates within a specific framework of opportunities and that the physical environment in which bargaining takes place is very important to understanding political outcomes. This article uses three of the new institutionalisms to answer two important questions concerning minority‐protecting institutions in the national constitutions of Denmark (Article 42) and Finland (Section 66). First, why were such institutions developed? Second, why were these institutions ultimately removed in Finland, but not in Denmark? For both countries, it is argued in this article that historical and discursive institutionalism are useful for understanding why such protections were originally considered necessary by particular political groups in society: the rise of socialism during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries compelled non‐reformist parties to push strongly for constitutional change that would legalize powerful procedural tools that could delay and potentially reverse policy decisions passed in parliament. However, the article invokes rational choice institutionalism to explain why the outcomes in terms of the use of such institutions differed over time in the two countries: differences concerning the scope and timing of the relevant procedures compelled opposition parties to utilize them differently. As a result, the legislative process was often stalemated in Finland (and the procedures were subsequently removed in 1992), while in Denmark, the procedures contributed to a parliamentary culture based on consensus and pre‐legislative bargaining and hence, still remain.
