Suchergebnisse

The paper examines, moving mainly from the analysis of the recent Austrian experience of the presidential elections of 2016, some theoretical, historical and comparative characteristics of populism(s). This, in order to identify the possible influences of the populist phenomenon on the party systems, on one side, and on the forms of State and forms of government, on the other side. ; 1 ; open ; Non definito ; open ; Mazza, Mauro ; Mazza, Mauro

The democratic reforms introduced in many sub-Saharan African countries during the 1990s involved the restoration of multipartism. The re-emergence of party politics spurred a number of analyses of the continent's new parties & party systems, largely based on theories & concepts derived from the study of advanced democracies. The article reviews & critically examines recent works on Africa's parties & party systems by presenting the dominant themes & issues & by investigating the utility of Western-derived models for the analysis of new multiparty regimes. In spite of a quantitative increase & a qualitative improvement in the study of Africa's parties & party systems, the latter still suffers a scarcity of empirical & theoretical investigations. At the same time, the use of political science tools for the study of party politics south of the Sahara is part of a broader positive trend towards a better integration of the analysis of African politics with that of politics in other world areas. Tables, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

The research is focused on the origin and the structure of the European party systems in long-standing democracies and in post-communist countries. Considering the differences between the western frozen party systems and the eastern unfrozen party systems, we propose a framework of analysis based on the theoretical and conceptual linkage between genetic approach and spatial theories of competition, identified in the normative component of a cleavage. At first, we propose some operational criteria to distinguish the dimensions of competition from the dimensions of identification through the use of the manifesto project surveys. Then, through the data of an expert survey and of some recent electoral mass surveys, we empirically test a set of propositions concerning, on the one hand, the congruence between party policy positions and party-voters policy positions and, on the other hand, the level of correlation between parties positions on different issue dimensions and their placement on the left-right axis.

The article provides a systematic test of the consequences of the electoral system for the format of the party system & the frequency of single-party majority cabinets. The test is based on Lijphart's 1994 data set (extended from 1990 to 1 Nov 2002), but excludes some of his cases, & introduces an additional indicator of the number of parties. Thanks to these changes in the research design, the variance explained by multivariate regression is much higher than Lijphart's results, especially as long as the elective parties (ie, the psychological effects of the electoral system) are concerned. At the same time, the post-1990 data show a decline of the predictive power of the main independent variable ("effective" threshold). In order to explain this decline, the author argues that the growing destructuration of Western parties & party systems occurring since the early 1990s should be taken into account. Indeed, entering into the regression an indicator of such a process (total net volatility) compensates for most of the threshold's lost explanatory power, thus suggesting that destructuration is a far more significant variable than previously recognized by the relevant literature. 11 Tables, 27 References. Adapted from the source document.

The debate on citizen images of political parties is long standing, but recently it has taken on added importance as the evidence of party dealignment has spread across Western democracies. This article assembles an unprecedented cross-national array of public opinion data that describe current images of political parties. Sentiments are broadly negative, & this pessimism has deepened over the past generation. Then, we demonstrate how distrust of parties decreases voting turnout, contributes to the fragmentation of contemporary party systems & the electoral base of new protest parties, & stimulates broader cynicism of government. Although political parties are the foundation of the system of representative democracy, fewer citizens today trust political parties, & this is reshaping the nature of democratic politics. 7 Tables, 2 Figures, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.

In 1970, a new institutional arena for interpolitical party competition was introduced in Italy with the creation of fifteen regions. This paper aims at developing the topic of territorial differentiation of the Italian party system. It highlights facets & features of regional party arenas through a comparison between these arenas & the national system. Five systemic properties are taken into account: fragmentation, concentration, competitiveness, net volatility, & regionalism of voting behavior. The various indexes measuring these dimensions have been computed from both regional & national election results. It appears that a general nondifferentiation between local & national arenas has occurred, with a few relevant exceptions. Also investigated is whether these properties & the pattern of regional voting have undergone any significant change during the transition from the so-called "first" to the "second" Italian Republic. Some distinctive cases &, overall, four clusters of local party systems are identified, & some hypotheses concerning the reasons for the emergence of the various patterns are offered. Notably, a "personal factor" in several southern regions may be regarded as relevant. 7 Tables, 3 Appendixes, 47 References. Adapted from the source document.

The framework developed by Lipset & Rokkan provides a strong starting point to apply the theory of cleavages to the emerging party systems of Eastern Europe. As Bartolini pointed out, the concept of cleavage contains three kind of components: empirical (which involves a differentiation among social groups), conflictual (which involves consciousness about social differentiation), & organizational (which expresses social stratification in organizational terms, to give formal defence to the group's identity & goals). This work presents a long-term analysis comparing pre-communist & post-communist party systems in five countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania & Slovakia. The main hypothesis suggests a strong impact of the class cleavage to determine the key differences in the voters alignments. More specifically, the Czech case maybe argue that the presence of the class cleavage before the communist regime improves the conditions for the development of a stable party competition, based on the western socio-economic alignments. On the other side, the absence (or the weakness) of the class cleavage in the pre-communist period, as the eastern trend widely emphasizes, maybe prevent the formation of clear political identities, making it less likely that the parties will recognize & respond to the alignments actually present in the western societies. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

The Italian and Spanish legal systems have recently been characterized by significant changes in the form of government. Faced with the fragmentation and instability of the party structures - new in the experience of the democratic Spain - the responses offered by the two systems seem inspired by different approaches: if in one case they triedto influence the party dynamics, enhancing the consensual logic, in Italy they intervened on the electoral formula, strengthening - in particular with law 52/2015 - the selectivity. The results generated by this strategy (in line with the reforming method of the last decades) have been problematic, aggravating the critical issues that were intended to be solved. ; L'ordinamento italiano e quello spagnolo sono segnati, di recente, da significativi mutamenti della forma di governo. Di fronte ad un quadro di frammentazione e instabilità degli assetti partitici – inedito nell'esperienza della Spagna democratica – le risposte offerte dai due sistemi paiono ispirate ad approcci sensibilmente diversi: se in un caso si è operato sul piano della dinamica partitica, valorizzando la logica consensuale, in Italia si è intervenuti sulla formula elettorale, rafforzandone – in particolare con la legge 52/2015 – la selettività. Gli esiti di quest'ultima strategia (nel segno della continuità con il metodo riformatore dominante negli ultimi decenni) si sono rivelati sotto molteplici profili disfunzionali, aggravando le criticità cui si intendeva porre rimedio

This volume, on the basis of France and Italy's cases, analyses the changes in party systems and, more generally, in our democracies. The author underlines how it is possible to glimpse the personalization and mediatisation of politics in the appearance of personal and personalised parties; he also studies the rise of populists imposing their themes, language and way of doing politics. The populist style spreads within society and the public space so intensively that the people fighting the populists at the lowest level, in the end, resume their opponents' style. As Ilvo Diamanti wrote: there is now a people-ocracyor a dynamic which is currently destabilising our democracies.