Enriching and empowering its readers, this work gives the most detailed and extensive data available on the policies and preferences of key democratic actors: parties, governments, and electors in twenty-five democracies over the whole post-war period. It provides a helpful CD-ROM, documentation and suggested uses for data, as well as extensive background information. Economists, socialists, and historians will find the book highly useful; political scientists, policy analysts, rational choice theorists, and comparativists will find it a must.

This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives...