Party Politics in New Democracies

by Webb, Paul; White, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780199289660
• ISBN10: 0199289662
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The sister volume to Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, this book offers a systematic and rigorous analysis of parties in some of the world's major new democracies. Drawing on a wealth of expertise and data, the book assesses the popular legitimacy, organizationaldevelopment and functional performance of political parties in Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe. It demonstrates the generational differences between parties in the old and new democracies, and reveals contrasts among the latter. Parties are shown to be at their most feeble in thoserecently transitional democracies characterized by personalistic, candidate-centred forms of politics, but in other new democracies - especially those with parliamentary systems - parties are more stable and institutionalized, enabling them to facilitate a meaningful degree of popular choice andcontrol. Wherever party politics is weakly institutionalized, political inequality tends to be greater, commitment to pluralism less certain, clientelism and corruption more pronounced, and populist demagoguery a greater temptation. Without party, democracy's hold is more tenuous. Comparative Politics is a series for scholars and students of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editor is David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester.The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.

Author Biography

Paul Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. He is author or editor of numerous publications, including The Modern British Party System (Sage Publications, 2000), Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Societies (Oxford University Press, 2002, coedited) and The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2005, coedited). He is currently an editor of the journals Party Politics and Representation.
Stephen White is Professor of International Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Glasgow, and a Senior Research Associate of its School of Slavonic, Central and East European Studies. A former president of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and chief editor of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, his recent books include Russia After Communism (coedited, Cass, 2002), Postcommunist Belarus (coedited, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and Developments in Russian Politics 6 (Palgrave and Duke, 2005).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Conceptualizing the Institutionalization and Performance of Political Parties in New Democracies

Russia's Client Party System

Political Parties in Ukraine: Virtual and Representational

Poland: Party System by Default

Building Party Government: Political Parties in the Czech and Slovak Republics

The Only Game in Town: Party Politics in Hungary

Parties and Governability in Brazil

'Que se Vayan Todos!' The struggle for Democratic Party Politics in Contemporary Argentina

Strong Parties in a Struggling Party System: Mexico in the Democratic Era

The Durability of the Party System in Chile

Political Parties in Costa Rica: Sustaining Democratic Stability in a Latin American Context

Political Parties in New Democracies: Trajectories of Development and Implications for Democracy

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.