Parliamentary government is generally taken to mean party government. Party cohesion and discipline are usually seen as central to the maintenance of parliamentary democracy. This overlap, between disciplined parties on the one hand and parliamentary government on the other, is often seen as so complete and so automatic that the question of party discipline is pushed to the sidelines and rarely studied. Yet, if individual legislators remain an undisciplined mob, parliaments could easily become unruly and anarchical.

How and why party discipline arises and is maintained are thus central...

Nine upper houses are analyzed in this book: the United States Senate, the German Bundesrat, the Australian Senate, the Canadian Senate, the French Senat, the British House of Lords, the Italian Senato, the Spanish Senado, and the Polish Senat. Although about a third of the world parliaments are bicameral, bicameralism has only recently come under scrutiny by political leaders in both stable and emerging democracies. In the United Kingdom and Canada, long-established upper houses are under intense pressure to reform; in Germany and Italy, upper houses have evolved to play a major role in...

In Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments, Miki Caul Kittilson examines women's presence in party politics and national legislatures, and the conditions under which their entrance occurs. She theorizes that parties are more likely to incorporate women when their strategy takes into account the institutional and political "opportunity structures" of both the party and party system. Kittilson studies how women pressed for greater representation, and how democratic party systems responded to their demands. Research on women's representation has largely focused at the national level....