This book explores the ways in which political parties, in contemporary parliamentary democracies, choose their leaders and then subsequently hold them accountable. The authors provide a comprehensive examination of party leadership selection and accountability both through examination of parties and countries in different institutional settings and through a holistic analysis of the role of party leaders and the methods through which they assume, and exit, the office.

The collection includes essays on Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal,...

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms.

This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors...

Membership of political parties is diverse. Not everyone participates and those who do, do not participate in the same way.

This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates...

In an ideal democracy, representatives would entirely reflect citizens views, preferences and wishes in their legislative work. However, real-life democracies do not meet this ideal and citizens policy preferences and priorities are mirrored only inadequately.

This book provides new insights on political representation. It is guided by three questions:

• what roles should representatives play?
• Who is actually or should be represented?
• How are the representatives (or how should they be) connected with the represented?

Containing...

Political leaders need ministers to help them rule and so conventional wisdom suggests that leaders appoint competent ministers to their cabinet.

This book shows this is not necessarily the case. It examines the conditions that facilitate survival in ministerial office and how they are linked to the political survival of heads of government and political institutions. Presenting a new formal theory of political survival in the cabinet, it systematically analyses the tenure in office of more than 7,300 ministers of foreign affairs covering more than 180 countries spanning the years...

Using a theoretical and empirical approach, this book investigates the structure and impact of political elites in contemporary democracies. It looks at two assumptions of the inevitability of political elites and the necessity of their constant adjustment to social and political challenges in order to survive and resolves this by addressing perspectives on the possible decline of elite autonomy. The core argument being that structure and behavior of political elites is the outcome of social and political development interaction constituting challenges and strategies to cope.

The...