First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This text charts the profound changes in the European political landscape over the last three decades along the polity, politics and public policy dimensions. It discusses how political science has responded to these changes in terms of its substantive focus, concepts, methods and theories

This book confronts and discusses different conceptions of political representation with respect to their application to the system of multi-level governance in the European Union. Political representation is an essentially contested concept. Its meaning has evolved with the development of representative democracy at the level of the nation state, and normative theories of political representation often evolved as a reflection on developing practices rather than the other way around.

Since the EU is not a conventional nation state, and since the effectiveness and legitimacy of classic...

The analysis of party systems in Western Europe has long constituted a major focus of concern in comparative political science. Now for the first time, many of the classic writings in this field have been collected into a single volume. The collection contains seminal writings by Weber, Neumann, Duverger, Kirchheimer, Daalder, Rokkan, and Sartori, as well as a selection from the more recent debates on changes in European party systems, including the contributions of Pedersen, Wolinetz, and Inglehart. The writings cover the development, stabilization, and transformation of party systems and...

This is the first full-length book to examine how we interpret evidence of change and stability in modern parties and party systems. Focusing primarily on processes of political adaptation and control, it also concerns how parties and party systems generate their own momentum and "freeze" themselves into place. Amid the widespread contemporary discussions of the challenge to modern democracy and the crisis of traditional forms of political representation, if offers a welcome emphasis on how party systems survive, and on how change, when it does occur, may be analyzed and understood.