This book updates, and takes stock of, Lipset and Rokkan's classic work Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, an influential work since its publication in 1967. With an introduction by the original author, Seymour Martin Lipset, it examines the significance of the original volume for the history of political sociology, and assesses its theoretical and empirical relevance for the study of elections, voters and parties now at the beginning of the 21st century. Most importantly, this volume gives scope to new areas such as consociational democracies, small island...

Finland's modern, technologically advanced welfare state is, in fact, a fairly recent creation, because the social changes that led to it occurred in Finland much later than elsewhere in the West. Once underway, however, such changes took place with unprecedented speed. This book is the story of what happens to parties, governments and voters when the fundamental features that conditioned party formation and voter alignments undergo rapid change. It is this that makes the Finnish case interesting and, as far as possible, this book examines Finland in a comparative perspective. Karvonen's...