This new book introduces innovative research on democracy from the leading Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP).

It details the key achievements of the project to date, illustrates how its findings may be applied, lays out the future challenges it faces and examines how the field as a whole can advance. It also presents a special assessment of the dimensionality of party competition, presenting ways in which research can be extended and related to broader approaches in Political Science and Theory.

Although CMP research is widely used and constitutes the major...

This new volume presents a wealth of fresh data documenting and analyzing the different positions taken by governments in the development of the European Constitution.

It examines how such decisions have substantial effects on the sovereignty of nation states and on the lives of citizens, independent of the ratification of a constitution. Few efforts have been made to document constitution building in a systematic and comparative manner, including the different steps and stages of this process. This book examines European Constitution-building by tracing the two-level policy...

This new volume develops a conceptual framework for considering and evaluating the roles played by the EU in international politics, drawing upon the literatures of role analysis, international relations and European integration.

It pays particular attention to five aspects of role analysis: role conceptions, origins of roles, role institutionalization, role performance and role impact. These form themes running through the volume and are dealt with in individual contributions as appropriate. It also presents fresh applications and empirical case studies that support the...

This volume examines and contributes to debates surrounding social capital, social movements and the role of civil society in emerging forms of governance.

The authors adopt a broad range of research approaches, from testing hypotheses drawn from rationale choice theory against available statistics on associations, to ethnographic study of emerging attempts at participant / deliberative democracy. Divided into three clear sections, focusing on the following core aspects of civil society:

- the position of civic organizations between state and society in emerging forms of...

Explores how governance structures - domestic political institutions, international peacekeeping efforts, armed interventions by other states - and natural resources affect the onset, dynamics and the termination of civil wars.

The book explores how implementation strategies engage sub-national, regional and local actors in the promotion of sustainable development.

Following the obligations incurred at the Rio Earth Summit and the related UNCED process, European states began to produce sustainable development strategies in the 1990s. Implementation efforts are increasingly using 'new' governance arrangements, including:

• use of public/private partnerships
• new policy tools
• policy transfer and benchmarking
• policy networks and involvement of stakeholder groups and...

Provides an exploration of European political parties making the move towards government for the first time.

This study brings together a broad range of empirical case studies on topics of interest such as environmental movements, human rights organizations and the international women's movement.

This volume explores a variety of forms of transnational private governance where non-state actors cooperate across borders to establish rules and standards accepted as legitimate by other agents.

Transnational private governance is a core feature of the devolution of power that we observe in the global realm and that is bringing about new forms of authority. Transnational Private Governance provides theoretically and empirically informed insights into the interactions between states and non-state actors including domains beyond intergovernmental organizations,...

Given the focus on the challenges to representative democracy and the search for new institutions and procedures to help increase participation, this text offers empirical insights on alternative conceptions of democracy and the actors that promote them.