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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Over the past half century, the behavior of German voters has changed profoundly - at first rather gradually, but during the last decade at accelerated speed. Electoral decision-making has become much more volatile, rendering election outcomes less predictable. Party system fragmentation intensified sharply. The success of the AfD put an end to Germany's exceptionality as one of the few European countries without a strong right-wing populist party. Utilizing a wide ran...
Personality Politics? assesses the role that voters' perceptions and evaluations of leaders play in democratic elections. The book presents evidence from an array of countries with diverse historical and institutional contexts, and employs innovative methodologies to determine the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. Addressing such questions as 'Where do leaders effects come from?', 'In which institutional contexts are leader effects more important?' and, 'To which kinds of voters are leaders a more prominent factor for voting behaviour?', the authors seek to determine whether the roles leaders play enhances or damages the electoral process, and what impact this has on the quality of democracy in electoral democracies today.
This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the many different facets of the Swiss political system and of the major developments in modern Swiss politics. It brings together a diverse set of more than 50 leading experts in their respective areas, who explore Switzerland's distinctive and sometimes intriguing politics at all levels and across multiple themes. In placing the topics in an international and comparative context and in conversation with the broader scholarly literature, the contributors provide a much-needed counterpoint to the rather idealized and sometimes outdated perception of Swiss politics. The work is divided into thematic sections that represent the inherent diversit...
What are the conceptual and methodological challenges facing comparative politics today? This informative book discusses four main challenges that create stress for disciplinary reproduction and advancement, while providing potential solutions. In seven chapters, the contributors cover the most pressing issues: the dissolution of the nation-state as the main objective of inquiry; the increasing complexity of concepts and methods; the capacity to accumulate knowledge; and the tensions between parsimonious and contextually rich explanations. Scholars and students of comparative politics, international relations and political science will be interested in the up-to-date overview of pertinent conceptual problems, as well as the possible ways forward. Practitioners and decision-makers will find the real-world examples provided in this book useful to their work.
Is European party politics hovering above society? Why do voters pick one party over others? Is it a question of class? Of religion? Of attitudes about taxes or immigration or global warming? Or is it something else entirely? The Structure of Political Competition in Western Europe takes a detailed look at the ways in which Western Europe’s party systems are anchored in social and ideological structures. The book’s first section focuses on the role of social structures - particularly education, class and religion - and analyzes the complex interplay among these factors. The second section addresses the ways that the sociological structures such as class and religion interact with voters�...
This book takes stock of the major economic and political challenges advanced capitalist democracies face today. It provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of key structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes.
Is large-scale immigration to Europe incompatible with the continent's generous and encompassing welfare states? Are Europeans willing to share welfare benefits with ethnically different and often less well-off immigrants? Or do they regard the newcomers as undeserving and their claim for welfare rights as unjustified? These questions are at the heart of what has to become known as the 'New Progressive Dilemma' debate — and the predominant answers given to them are rather pessimistic. Pointing to the experiences of the US, where a multi-racial society in combination with a longstanding history of immigration encounters very limited welfare provision, many Europeans fear that the continent'...
In the first study of comparative direct-democracy, Laurent Bernhard explores the nature of direct-democratic campaigning in Switzerland. The author examines four policy areas: immigration, healthcare, welfare and economic liberalism focussing on interviews with campaign managers to provide a comprehensive analysis of direct-democratic campaigning.
Building and sustaining solidarity is a compelling challenge, especially in ethnically and religiously diverse societies. Recent research has concentrated on forces that trigger backlash and exclusion. The Strains of Commitment examines the politics of diversity in the opposite direction, exploring the potential sources of support for an inclusive solidarity, in particular political sources of solidarity. The volume asks three questions: Is solidarity really necessary for successful modern societies? Is diversity really a threat to solidarity? And what types of political communities, political agents, and political institutions and policies help sustain solidarity in contexts of diversity? T...
In an ideal democracy, representatives would entirely reflect citizens’ views, preferences and wishes in their legislative work. However, real-life democracies do not meet this ideal and citizens’ policy preferences and priorities are mirrored only inadequately. This book provides new insights on political representation. It is guided by three questions: what roles should representatives play? Who is actually or should be represented? How are the representatives (or how should they be) connected with the represented? Containing contributions from the perspectives of political theory and philosophy, as well as quantitative empirical studies, the volume demonstrates the need to adapt these established questions to new political realities. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of political representation and parties, political theory, democratic theory, political philosophy and comparative politics.