Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Process - Political Parties

During the last decade and a half a new political party family, the extreme Right-wing populist (ERP) parties, has established itself in a variety of West European democracies. These parties represent a monist politics based on ethnic nationalism and xenophobia as well as an opposition against the 'political establishment'. Being the prototypic ERP party, the French Front National (FN) has been a model for ERP parties emerging elsewhere in Western Europe.

This study presents a theoretically based explanation that combines the macro and the micro-level, as well as the political...

Using German political parties as a prism with which to view institutional change, this collection transcends a single country focus and places the German experience in a comparative and historical framework. Evaluation the performance of the German parties and party system in dealing with problems of integration and legitimation common to all industrialized democracies, it presents a sharp analysis of the effects and incompleteness of German unification.

The northern Italian, 'Padanian' identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy's (real or presumed) inadequacies - such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime - this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only...

This edited collection looks at how political parties in Turkey actually work, inside and out. Departing from traditional macro-level analyses, the book offers a new sociological approach to the study of political parties, treating them as non-unitary entities composed of many different groups and individuals who both cooperate and compete with one another.

The central proposition of the book is that parties must be studied as clusters of relationships in specific locales rather than as unitary 'black boxes.' This ground-up approach provides new insights into the internal workings...

Although the Socialist or Social Democractic parties played a key role in West European politics during the quarter century after the Second World War, they have been studied far less than their political rivals, the Christian Democrats. The story of West European Social Democracy after 1945 begins with a dilemma: Democratic marxism, which had been the parties' ideological and organizational principle until the Second World War, was becoming politically irrelevant. The three parties analyzed here represent the spectrum of reactions among Social Democratic parties to this realization. The...