Study Of Political Parties Research Articles

Confronting EU unpopularity: the contribution of political marketing

Political marketing is making headway around the world. However, this development is not uniform in nature. Research to date into political marketing has offered limited insights into different national contexts and involves only the study of political parties or of particular political campaigns. Research into government policy-making and political marketing is also immature. The present analysis of political marketing and EU integration addresses this gap in the research. More specifically, following a deductive approach, this paper investigates whether EU policy-making conforms to the Lees-Marshment political organisation behaviour model, in particular, its market-orientation element. It argues that the decline in popular support for European integration is the result of a lack of market orientation in EU policy-making. Group social psychology is deemed to be at the root of public dissatisfaction with EU policy-making and the lack of market orientation of the latter. While pressure from voters (the market) should not feed directly into EU policy-making without any input from political organisations, public consultation on EU policy should take place at all stages of the policy process.

The study of political parties and the party system in France

The French academic literature about political parties and party systems has been structured by the initial debate between Maurice Duverger and Georges Lavau. On the one hand, Duverger (1951) in Les partis politiques proposed a multi-faceted ‘theory’ of political parties and structures of party competition. His core focus was on parties as organizations and on the role of institutions as the causal explanation of patterns of party competition (hence his three laws about the link between electoral and party systems). On the other hand, Georges Lavau (1953) preferred to look at the realites sociales, anchoring the analysis of political parties in historical traditions, social and economic conditions pertaining to each country. The often-quoted paradox is that Duverger's contribution had a broad international appeal, while Lavau succeeded in making this work despised in France. What has, maybe, been overlooked is the (probably unintended and unexpected) consequence for the study of political parties in France: whereas Duverger proposed an analysis defined by comparison and inference, the bulk of the French literature has been parochial, claiming at most the exceptional nature of French politics and political parties. This almost uncontested axiom of France as the exception has been based on five main characteristics (...).

Europeanization and political parties

This Living Review makes the case for the study of Europeanization and political parties as related but distinct from the study of political parties and European integration. It then presents the Europeanization approach to parties, noting that some of the components in this approach developed to study policy and institutional change may not lend themselves so well to the study of national parties. This argument distinguishes between direct and indirect e ects of European Union in uence on parties. Next, it brie y discusses the application of party Europeanization research to post-communist parties. This is followed by a discussion of proposed normative consequences of party Europeanization. Finally, suggestions for further research focuses on the need for re ning the analytic framework in order to better identify the causal mechanisms speci c to party Europeanization.

The African National Congress (ANC) organization at the grassroots

This article provides a study of the African National Congress (ANC) local organization at party branch level. It focuses on the branches’ community activities, on their participation in party structures, and on the ANC political culture. It takes an organizational perspective on the study of political parties and refers to the mass party model. The ANC has a strong tradition of mass organization, and the ANC formal organization conforms to the mass party ideal-type: branches are meant to be active agents on the ground, while the party leadership is supposed to implement the membership's decisions. The ANC has developed a certain type of mass political culture, of popular politics. The article also shows how bottom-up decision-making processes concretely provide a certain level of influence to the members over the selection of leadership and the party's policies (even if through intermediary brokers). This article is a contribution to the renewed academic debates on African political parties and takes the stand that organizational and empirical approaches should be a priority.

Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (review)

Reviewed by: Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction Andrew L. Slap Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. By James K. Hogue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.) James K. Hogue tackles an important and timely subject in his book on violence in New Orleans during Reconstruction. While concentrating on “reappraising the nature of violent politics of Reconstruction,” Hogue ambitiously has many other goals. For instance, he argues that “not coincidentally, this era of state government backed by federal military occupation preceded one of the longest periods of unbroken one-party dominance in American history” (8). Unfortunately, he offers no support for this hypothesis, with only a few pages on post-Reconstruction politics and nothing past 1900. This failure is unfortunately symptomatic of the entire work. Uncivil War is a traditional political history of Reconstruction in Louisiana that mostly uses government records and secondary sources to cover well-trod ground. Given the title, surprisingly less than 10 percent of the book deals directly with the street battles. This limited treatment makes it impossible for Hogue to meet his goals of beginning “to rethink the meaning and nature of ‘battle’ itself” and “to reconceptualize both the fighting and the roles that different types of military forces played in its [Reconstruction] origins, development, and outcome” (4, 11). While finding sources for street battles can be hard, [End Page 209] Hogue does not employ all of the primary and secondary sources available. For instance, he visited the U.S. Military Academy Library but did not use its James Fornance Papers, which include the letters of an army lieutenant writing home about his participation in one of the book’s street battles. Hogue also never mentions several articles on the street battles, such as Donald E. Reynolds’s “The New Orleans Riot of 1866 Reconsidered,” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964): 5–27. Most of Uncivil War covers the political events in between the street battles. A failure to engage the relevant historiography dooms Hogue’s efforts to reappraise Reconstruction politics. He regularly creates straw men, referring to the positions of “many historians” or “modern scholars” while offering few, and many times no, examples or citations (14, 45, 52, 59, 113, 125, 169). At one point he refers to the interpretations of “recent scholars” and cites two books published in 1967 and 1982 (183). Hogue’s major straw man is the New Political History (NPH), as he repeatedly argues that “historians have all too often mistakenly tried to make Reconstruction’s origins, development, and outcome fit a model of stable, competitive party politics, articulated by the study of political parties, interest groups, voter mobilization, and election returns” (7, 9, 186). First, Hogue only cites Michael Perman’s work to assert the NPH’s dominance, never mentioning scholars like Joel Silbey, Michael F. Holt, or Richard McCormick. Second, historians have been attacking the NPH for over a decade—in the late 1990s the Journal of American History sponsored two roundtables challenging its paradigms. Finally, Hogue ignores the work dealing with Reconstruction political history outside the NPH, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (2001). Hogue regularly fails to mention prominent works that bear directly on his study. While repeatedly discussing Ulysses S. Grant during Reconstruction, he never uses Brooks D. Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991). Hogue spends several pages trying to place Louisiana’s Reconstruction political corruption in the broader context of nineteenth-century America without mentioning Mark W. Summer’s The Era of Good Stealings (1993). William L. Richter’s Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (1987) would have provided a nice comparison with events in Louisiana. Lack of a firm historiographical grounding leads to significant interpretive errors. For example, Hogue asserts that “white militia officers of northern origin tended to have demonstrated an ideological devotion to the radical [End Page 210] wing of the Republican Party . . . by their service with black...

Political Parties and Political Systems: The Concept of Linkage Revisited

Political Parties and Political Systems: The Concept of Linkage Revisited, Andrea Römmele, David M. Farrell, Piero Ignazi, eds., Westport CN: Praeger/Greenwood, 2005, pp. x, 181.This is a book of nine short essays that develop and extend the ideas of linkage theory. The nature of the relationship between citizens and the state, through political parties and other organizations, has been a focus of study in a range of democratic regimes at least since de Tocqueville. Kay Lawson has dedicated a career to the study and classification of linkage relationships and to developing theories about how citizens and subjects are linked to the state. Lawson's best-known works included The Comparative Study of Political Parties (1976), Political Parties and Linkage: A Comparative Perspective (1980), When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations (co-edited with Peter H. Merkl, 1988), and How Political Parties Work: Perspectives from Within (1994).. This volume does not claim to be a festschrift but it celebrates, applies and extends her work.

The Study of Political Parties, 1906–2005: The View from the Journals

The Study of Political Parties, 1906–2005: The View from the Journals

The Study of Political Parties, 1906–2005: The View from the Journals

A review of party-related articles in major political science journals over the past century reveals an increase in the incidence of such articles during the behavioral revolution and a decline in the proportion of studies that view parties holistically or in their organizational aspects and an increase in research on mass and legislative behavior. The essay calls for scholars of American parties to merge empirical findings with the generalist and normative concerns of an earlier age, to assess the recent advent of parties as ideologically focused instruments of policymaking.

Maurice Duverger and the Study of Political Parties

Over a half century's experience with Duverger's Les Partis Politiques offers an opportunity to test his theory. His explanations for the numbers of parties survives as Duverger's Law, while his predictions for the development of the ‘membership party’ have not. Since the two rest on divergent explanations of electoral politics, the success of one and the failure of the other present an excellent test of our theories of electoral politics. Duverger's explanation of the numbers of parties understands free elections as markets in which candidates and voters alter their behavior as they try to get as close as possible to their preferred outcome. Duverger, in contrast, saw party organization as a product of ‘social forces’, notably the composition of the electorate. The ‘cadre’ party was the product of limited suffrage, while universal suffrage would lead to the ‘mass-based membership’ party. Given that the latter never developed, we argue that the logic Duverger applied to the numbers of parties also applies to their organization. We note how periodic free elections create markets where individuals pursue three fundamental political drives: ambition, choice, and benefits; whatever political organization develops, must respond to these three drives.

The Politics of Women's Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change. By Christina Wolbrecht. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 266p. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

When we talk about the gender gap, students in my Women and Politics course are always surprised to learn that men used to be more likely than women to support the Democratic Party and that Republicans were the original supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Many people forget, or are not familiar with, the significant party transformations on these issues over the last 50 years. Christina Wolbrecht's new book provides important insights into this transformation and is a valuable contribution. The study of political parties has not, to date, accounted for this phenomenon, and gender studies too often ignore the crucial role of political parties in our system.

Parties and Partisanship: A 40-Year Retrospective

The study of political parties and voter partisanship has come full circle in 4 decades. During the 1960s and 1970s numerous scholars advanced the thesis of party decline, contending that party organizations had disintegrated, party influence in government had plummeted, and voter partisanship had eroded. The 1980s and 1990s saw a turnaround in scholarly judgments, however, as first party organizations, then party in government, and finally voter partisanship appeared to strengthen. This article reviews the evidence for the downs and ups of parties, suggesting that the evidence of party resurgence is more equivocal than often realized. The parties subfield currently lacks the theory and theoretical sensitivity that enables us to interpret ambiguous empirical evidence. This contrasts with the congressional subfield where the issues now confronting the parties subfield were recognized a decade ago.

Politicians and party politics

The study of political parties has usually focused on the organizations themselves and their roles in government and politics. This text shifts that focus to the individuals who make up political parties - the politician as member of a political party, the politician as part of the political process, and the politician in relation to his or her constituents. With 13 contributed essays, this volume examines how politicians as party members motivate voters, how they conduct campaigns and how they behave in government. With interests ranging from public opinion research to democratic theory, the contributors bring an array of theories and data to bear on age-old problems. They seek to offer a new way to think about party coalitions, question the benefits of tow-party competition and focus on politics as a vocation. By putting the politician centrestage and examining issues from a variety of viewpoints, the volume advances the argument that, to understand party politics, one must understand the motives and actions of politicians themselves.

Party Ideology in America: The National Republican Chapter, 1828–1924

Conventional wisdom states that where ideas and values have mattered in American political life they have usually been the product of a single, overarching political culture. The United States, it is argued, has had political conflict but notideologicalconflict. Perhaps nowhere is this premise more noticeable than in the study of political parties. According to Du-verger, “[T]he two parties are rival teams, one occupying office, the other seeking to dislodge it. It is a struggle between theinsand theouts, which never becomes fanatical, and creates no deep cleavage in the country.” Everett Carll Ladd writes, “[T]he need to seek support within an overarching ideological consensus, has historically imposed certain characteristics on the major American parties – social group inclusiveness, accommodationism, a ‘non-ideological’ stance vis-a-vis their principal opponents (which, after all, accept the same ideology).”

Economic Theories of Organization and the Politics of Institutional Design in Political Parties

The following article applies the principal-agent model to the politics of institutional design, that is, the relationship between representatives and their intra-party constituencies, in three social democratic parties. It examines whether the principal-agent thesis provides a useful methodological tool for the analysis of intra-party struggles over organizational distributions of power. The study concludes that the model is indeed applicable to the study of internal decision-making processes and conflict, but that a more rigorous test and application is necessary to fully ascertain its methodological and theoretical value for the study of political parties in general.

New Forms of Political Representation: European Ecological Politics and the Montreal Citizen's Movement

AbstractIn his examinations of the ecological parties of Belgium and West Germany, Herbert Kitschelt argues that he has found a new form of political representation that defies patterns of behaviour outlined for political parties by all previous scholarly work. These parties, which Kitschelt calls “left-libertarian,” are unique because they lack the organizational structures common to traditional parties, and include in their membership constituencies that are normally more comfortable in social movements. This article compares the political platforms of these parties and the sociological characteristics of their activists with those of the Montreal Citizen's Movement (MCM) and concludes that the MCM is indeed a left-libertarian party. However, an examination of the MCM reveals that although Kitschelt has found a new form of political representation in the left-libertarian party, this new form does not actually defy the developmental patterns outlined by the classical studies of political parties.

The study of political parties in Greece

The study of political parties in Greece

Notes on the Study of Political Parties in the Third World

The research on political parties in developing nations is difficult to aggregate and to place in a comparative context. The reasons are many. The body of work is at best modest in size as well as uneven in focus, theoretical conception and empirical execution. Often comparative or more generalizable indicators and conclusions must be extracted from studies intended to clarify social developments over broad periods of time or, alternatively, within carefully set historical boundaries (the colonial; the transition from the colonial period to independence; post-independence developments; political conditions under specific national leaders, as examples). The efforts are broad stroke, primarily descriptive and usually interwoven with historical accounts and explanations of the social, economic and cultural factors that condition the life of a country. The range appears to run from megatheories-or, more accurately, broadly generalized interpretative sets of categorizations and conclusions applied to a region or a collection of countries (the research itself is seldom theoretically focused), supported by interpretative essays and expert, professionalized observation and background knowledge-to case studies of differing degrees of elaborateness. There is little in between.

Political Parties: The Missing Variable in Women and Politics Research

An explosion in the literature on women and politics has been stimulated by the contemporary women's movement. This paper argues that an early diversity in theoretical orientation and methodology has been replaced by a narrow orthodoxy characterized by the use of polling and the survey method, and the theoretical voting behavior model employed by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. Left out of this approach is the study of political parties as organizations-a variable presented here as essential to the study of women in politics. The image of parties in women and politics scholarship is surveyed, as are the theoretical implications of ignoring women's gains in political parties in such studies.

Political Parties: Towards a New Theoretical Synthesis

Three conceptions of the political party can be distinguished. They are Seiler's sociocultural cleavage approach; Lawson's notion of the linkage party, based upon participatory, policy-responsive, clientèle reward and government directive linkages; and Offerlé's conception of parties as political enterprises concentrating upon partisan supply to the political market. After suggesting that, whatever their partial merits, none of these approaches provides the basis for a comprehensive theory of political parties, a dual party approach is prepared. Every party exists in and for itself as well as interacting with a constraining environment. A dialectical model, based upon relations between internal decision-making and external competition within the context of the rules of the game, offers the best prospect of further advance in the study of political parties.

On the Study of Political Parties in Canada

Political parties are institutions of central importance in the democratic process, and the study of parties is an important reflection of the state of political science as a discipline. As a key linkage between state and society, parties can tell us a great deal about the winners and losers of political competition, about the degree to which structural biases exist in the decision-making process, and about the effectiveness of our system of political representation. An examination of parties also can provide a bearing on the implications of other institutional characteristics within the political system, including the effects of the electoral system, parliamentary versus congressional executive-legislative relations and federalism. Not only can we learn much about the operation of Canadian democracy from studying political parties, we also can learn much about the study of political science. Parties are so amorphous, they touch on so many aspects of the political process, and they have such intriguing