Recent election success across the continent strikingly demonstrates the endurance of the extreme right in Europe. Piero Ignazi's volume provides the definitive account of this important political phenomenon. What is its significance? Why have such parties prospered in some countries and not others? Who votes for them and why? These are some of the questions that the book aims to answer during the course of its broad-ranging analysis.

The popular pressures for reforms of the democratic process have mounted across the OECD nations over the past generation. In response, democratic institutions are changing, evolving, and expanding in ways that may alter the structure of the democratic process. These changes include reforms of the electoral process, the expansion of referendums, introduction of open government provisions, and more access points for direct political involvement. Indeed, some observers claim that we are witnessing the most fundamental transformation of the democratic process since the creation of mass democracy...

Representation and party politics is one of the core themes of the comparatvie study of politics.

Since the 1980s and the collapse of communist, military, and race-based regimes across the world, the euphoria has given way to the question of how to enhance the viability of democratic constitutional government. This text covers this issue.

In this new work, two leading political scientists reassess the shifting fortunes of the Whitehall model of governance - and find it wanting.
As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, it has become clear that the model now has much less currency abroad as well as in the UK. The neo-liberal assaults of Thatcherism and the political drift of the Major years has meant that whereas, previously, 'Whitehall' symbolized a synergy between the political leadership and the permanent bureaucracy, it now evokes images of executive disarray and the subservience of career civil servants to...