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In this article, we analyse changes, and the debates about changes, in the relationship between Norwegian political parties and their members. We ask whether parties develop from mass parties towards a 'network model', and whether such changes represent organizational convergence. The organizational diagnoses of the parties and their prescribed cures are similar. Thematic network structures, increased inclusiveness and membership ballots are debated within the parties, but actual change has been modest. While the Internet has brought about substantial change in the internal communication of parties, there is remarkable stability in Norwegian party organizations. Many of the structures and practices of the mass party remain, but network structures have emerged as an alternative ideal.

After analyzing the function & structure of the British Conservative & Labor Parties from information based on recent res, the author concludes that the mass party is not appropriate to American conditions. Because party activists are zealots, methods are found in both British parties of preventing their deciding party policy, in order not to antagonize the moderate voter. Because the US lacks the aristocratic tradition & respect for the leader, an American mass party would be more difficult to keep in its place. Duverger has argued that American parties are backward in comparison with European because of their lack of class-consciousness. But the reverse is probably true; absence of class-consciousness is a characteristic of an advanced econ. Since America has had universal suffrage longer than any European country, it cannot be argued that absence of mass parties is a sign of pol'al immaturity. (AIPSA).

This research examines the form and content of state party websites in the 2000 US election, and considers whether or not state parties are following the lead of the national parties. Generally, state parties attempted to provide essential party functions online, but lacked technical sophistication in 2000. The range of state party websites was broad - from state parties that lacked simple graphics to those with streaming video. Highly integrated parties (those receiving large soft-money transfers) produced the strongest websites and demonstrated the most expertise in this emerging medium.

In this book the author proposes that parties are indispensable to modern politics and that the absence of parties suggests that a system is governed by a traditional elite which has yet to come to terms with the modern world. Without them it would be impossible to legitimize modern systems, to engage the loyalty and support of the citizens. The alternative to party rule is either aristocracy or violent repression. In all systems the party widens the area from which political leaders are recruited and is thus a 'democratising' if not necessarily a 'liberalising' force.

Anti-immigration parties have experienced electoral lift-off in most Western democracies, although the consequences of their victories for real-life policy outcomes have remained largely unexplored. A key question is: do electoral pressures from anti-immigration parties have a 'contagion' impact on other parties' immigration policy positions? In this article, I argue and empirically demonstrate that this is the case. On the basis of a comparative-empirical study of 75 parties in 11 Western European countries, I conclude that this contagion effect involves entire party systems rather than the mainstream right only. In addition, I find that opposition parties are more vulnerable to this contagion effect than parties in government. The findings of this article imply that anti-immigration parties are able to influence policy output in their political systems without entering government.

Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates inelectionsand when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives ingovernment. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and analytically unwieldy, particularly if modeled explicitly and considered in total, from citizen preferences through government outcomes. To strike a balance between complexity and tractability, we modify standard spatial models of electoral competition and governmental policy-making to study how components of partisanship—such as candidate platform separation in elections, party ID-based voting, national partisan tides, and party-disciplined behavior in the legislature—are related to policy outcomes. We definepartisan biasas the distance between the following two points in a conventional choice space: the ideal point of the median voter in the median legislative district and the policy outcome selected by the elected legislature. The study reveals that none of the party-in-electorate conditions is capable of producing partisan bias independently. Specified combinations of conditions, however, can significantly increase the bias and/or the variance of policy outcomes, sometimes in subtle ways.

If a country has no developed political party system, it is not really a democracy. And the development of political parties in Russia has a long way to go. The only branch of government in which parties play an influential role is in the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) -- not in the Federation Council (the upper house) or the executive branch. Addressing the question of why parties have developed so little elsewhere, it is argued that they are weak because the most powerful politicians choose to make them so. This institutional arrangement suits their purposes to control what happens in government from the top. Tracing the origins of this situation reveals that they lie in Russian history & culture, predating the Soviet period. Another impediment to party development is the scale of socioeconomic change in Russia. Socioeconomic cleavages were important to party development in Western Europe, with liberal & conservative parties representing different sectors of the population. However, there is reason for optimism for the future. While Putin enjoys solid support from the people, other major political actors do not; if Putin should cease to identify with Unified Russia, the majority party's future is uncertain. Also, a 2002 law passed by both houses & the president requires regional parliaments to be proportional in terms of political party representation. This will lead to party development at the regional level, which conceivably could spread upward. Tables. J. Stanton

Political Parties, William Cross, The Canadian Democratic
Audit series; Vancouver, UBC Press, 2004, pp. 218.Political Parties is part of the Canadian Democratic
Audit series. The expressed aim of the series is to "examine
the way Canadian democracy functions" using three benchmarks,
"public participation, inclusiveness and responsiveness," with
the principle output being not so much a report card but the desire to
"encourage ongoing discussion of how best to fashion Canada's
democratic institutions and practices well into the new century"
(http://www.mta.ca/faculty/arts-letters/canadian_studies/cda/pdf/demaudit_overview_15aug.pdf).
Cross's short, readable volume achieves these objectives.

"A modern book for a modern parties course Seth Masket and Hans Noel bring a contemporary perspective and engaging writing to the political parties course. Using key material from contemporary and foundational research, Masket and Noel focus on how parties solve important problems in the American political system. This perspective reveals the importance of political parties, their inner workings, and their failures and successes"--

The thesis deals with Lebanese political parties and their encounters with modernity. The three parties dealt with in this study hold the idea that they are "real" parties that bring about the "real" nation. The objective of the present thesis is to examine what "real" refers to. This study suggests that all three parties are heavily influenced by asymmetrical references to a global normativity. These references are informed by the parties'experience in Lebanonwhere they find themselves positioned within global theoretical abstractions and where both, the normativity as well as their abstractions, are felt even in party members' daily lives.International socio-scientific literature has identified two trends that, as the literature suggests, had evolved since the late twentieth century: First, the nation-state had become less important, and, second, utopian thinking had vanished. The study adds up various panoramas of situations when it became urgent to define one's identity and claims that important constituents of modernity, such as the individual, the nation, progress, and representing the demos, serve for the parties in question as resources of utopian elements. This becomes evident from official texts and personal self-narrations. Most importantly, Lebanese parties are still taking the nation state as their central reference point and aim at bringing the nation state about because to them it is the legitimate form of organization of society. In consequence, this thesis questions if the alleged weakening of modernity and its intellectualprogram can be claimed a universal age. It proposes a stronger emphasis on the enforcing, the "pedagogical" (Bhabha) side of representation by researching political parties to make utopian elements visible.