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Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It intends to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics. There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems. This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria: In every case, a model of human behavior or institutional impact is specified; Also in every case, this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether this model is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.

Maurice Duverger is arguably the most distinguished French political scientist of the last century, but his major impact has, strangely enough, been largely in the English-speaking world. His book, Political Parties, first translated into English in 1954, has been very influential in both the party politics literature (which continues to make use of his typology of party organization) and in the electoral systems literature. His chief contributions there deal with what have come to be called in his honor Duverger's Law and Duverger's Hypothesis. The first argues that countries with plurality-based electoral methods will tend to become two-party systems; the second argues that countries using proportional representation (PR) methods will tend to become multi-party systems. Duverger also identifies specific mechanisms that will produce these effects, conventionally referred to as “mechanical effects”, and “psychological effects”. However, while Duverger's Hypothesis concerning the link between PR and multipartism is now widely accepted; the empirical evidence that plurality voting results in two-party systems is remarkably weak—with the U.S. the most notable exception. The chapters in this volume consider national-level evidence for the operation of Duverger's law in the world's largest, longest-lived and most successful democracies of Britain, Canada, India and the United States. One set of papers involves looking at the overall evidence for Duverger's Law in these countries; the other set deals with evidence for the mechanical and incentive effects predicted by Duverger. The result is an incisive analysis of electoral and party dynamics.

This book discusses theories of crisis management and the radical right, to shed light on how responses to crisis influence radical right parties in their presence, discourse, and evolution. The book offers a comparative perspective by examining case studies with various traditions of radical right actors, presenting data on how crisis exploitation can assist in exploring, reconsidering, bargaining, and learning about the prospects of change of political parties. The book focuses on the debate on radicalization and crisis management. Similar to the already existing economic, political, post-Brexit, and migration crises in Europe, discourses of fear around the latest health crisis are paving the way for further radicalised discourse from the far right. The book looks into how radical right parties in Europe have responded to these crises. It monitors and explores how crisis exploitation impacts political strategies, opportunity-seeking behaviours, and the evolution of the discourse of radical right parties in the contemporary political landscape. Therefore, this book is a must-read for researchers, students, and policy-makers, interested in a better understanding of populism, radical right parties, electoral studies, as well as comparative politics in general.

The textbook is primarily aimed at students and younger researchers and offers a concise but systematic practical guide to planning and conducting qualitative expert interviews in political science. It provides a methodologically sound and application- or problem-oriented approach to this form of independent qualitative data collection. The English translation of this book, originally in German, was facilitated by artificial intelligence. The content was later revised by the author for accuracy and adapted to an international readership.

The book by the well-known German party researcher Elmar Wiesendahl presents the development, theoretical perspectives, research approaches, and fields of investigation in party research in light of the state of the art.

This book offers a comparative perspective on the technological, economic, and political aspects of Internet development in the post-Soviet countries. In doing so, international experts analyze similarities and differences in various countries throughout the chapters.The volume consists of two parts. The chapters of the first part examine the post-Soviet area as a whole. The second part includes specific case studies on the development of the Internet, either in individual countries or in groups of countries. Countries analyzed are Estonia, Ukraine, Russia as well as three Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Topics covered in the volume include, but are not limited to measurement, dynamics, and structure of each national Internet audience; the history of the Internet in the post-Soviet countries; development of infrastructure; Internet regulation and institutional aspects; online markets such as telecommunications, online advertising, e-commerce, and digital content; social and cultural aspects; as well as the transformation of the national media systems. This book is a must-read for students, researchers, and scholars of political science and economics, as well as policymakers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of Internet development in the post-Soviet area.

Historically, Donald Trump will be remembered as the first American president to be impeached twice and indicted. He fed the grotesque myth that the election was stolen and summoned his supporters to storm Congress on 6 January 2021 in a bid to thwart the certification of Joe Biden's U.S. presidential election victory. This volume vividly recounts the dramatic narrative of the January 6 Coup in America and how close we came to losing U.S. democracy. For anyone seeking a comprehensive and multidisciplinary global overview of democracy, an astute analysis of the forces that drive the dominance of the (neo)liberal paradigm of the last decades should look no further than this volume. Yet the volume takes the issue further by vigorously documenting the decline of the U.S. treaty process (America's dysfunctional diplomacy and the doctrine of unpredictability). There is an urgent need for a massive infusion of strategic support for democracy in the United States. Because come 2024or thereafter an unfinished work might drag American democracy to a dangerous inflection point. Trump (who has a complete hold on the Republican party, still has a stranglehold on the MAGA base no matter what he does, was instrumental to the breaking of U.S. diplomacy. Undermining the democratic legitimacy of International Law adversely affected U.S. foreign policy. Some federal and lower courts in the judiciary of the United States pose a real threat to Americans'democracy as well. To that end, when ‘the principle of truth'loses its relevance and meaning as benchmarks for appraisals and decisions, and becomes a harmful tool for willful propaganda. Everybody should be worried about U.S. democracy. A'real'crisis is coming! U.S. Democracy is at a breaking point. Like a giant modern mirror standing behind democracy itself, this book is a citizen's guide to saving U.S. Democracy. Expertly drawn on global and regional examples and current literature, the volume closes agap in the multidisciplinary field. Quite useful as a valuable resource as it helps us understand the shifting Trump agenda in diverse areas. Essential reference across a range of subjects, bringing together contributions from scholars, and policymakers alike. This extraordinarily well-researched and practically crafted, culture-inclusive text could not be more relevant or timelier. It is a must for everyone. This volume will help to shape the political landscape of the 21st century and will remain a vital source of inspiration for modern-day scholars and political activists.

This book examines different dimensions of digital communication and populism in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. While doing so, it discusses views, opinions, and research results regarding the conditions, experiences, constraints, benefits, and challenges related to the topic - not only using theoretical and methodological approaches but also practical perspectives. The COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic significantly accelerated the technological revolution presenting many social, economic, and political challenges, as it pushed the world into cyberspace to ensure social distancing. At the same time, many populist protests expressed in the digital public sphere massively gained importance during the lockdowns. As a result, one of the most significant consequences of using electronic tools is not only greater e-participation of citizens, but - especially evident through elections during a pandemic - even greater transfer of political communication and election campaigns into the space of new media. The book broadly analyses various contexts of digitalization of communication processes and populist politics from both theoretical and empirical perspectives in various case studies on the digitalization of information, communication, or participation processes during the COVID-19 pandemic in selected European countries and beyond. This book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of political communication, political science, electoral studies, digital politics, and democracy, as well as policy-makers interested in a better understanding of digital communication and populism during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This book analyzes the social legitimacy deficit of the European Parliament (EP) in the United Kingdom and Greece. It does so by considering it, partially, a communication deficit, and by addressing the relevant inadequacies of its communication and media relations performance. Following this approach, the book identifies and critically analyzes the problems that the European Parliament is facing in communicating and portraying itself to news websites in the United Kingdom and Greece, and offers potential solutions to the issues presented.The book provides an initial comparison of the scale of the problems that the EP is facing in its communication and media relations performance in Greece and in the United Kingdom, focusing on a number of prominent, carefully selected, impartial or pro-European websites. The failures of the EP to secure adequate levels of visibility on these websites automatically signify serious basic weaknesses in its communication strategy. This bookidentifies those weaknesses, their causes, and presents solutions on how to solve them. Therefore, this book is a must-read for students and scholars of political science and media communication, as well as policy-makers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of the European Parliament's social legitimacy and communication deficit.

This book puts forward a new perspective, the historical dynamics of Chinese politics, for better understanding China's politics, which is from the vertical history of China and the dimension of horizontal world politics, combining the historical analysis of how Chinese politics has come along the way and the comparative analysis of China's governance achievements in world politics. Based on this premise, this book attempts to explain the democratic discourse of contemporary Chinese political logic. The historical dynamics of Chinese politics comes from long-term communication between the author and Western scholars, which may help the global audience to understand China's politics from all angles.

This book presents a number of specific proposals that, if translated into political reality, could contribute to nurturing a Europeanisation of national public spheres. Having left Brexit behind, intellectuals and policy-makers throughout Europe are now passionately discussing how to move forward the process of European integration. Crucial to this effort is the debate about the Europeanisation of national public spheres: a process that should not harm existing national and local identities but, rather, contribute to their enrichment. This book addresses policy-makers, academics, and forward-thinking citizens alike by providing them with a variety of ideas - and the practical steps needed to translate these into reality across selected European countries - to begin narrowing a dangerous gap between national politics and supranational policy-making.

This book examines a selection of themes that have become salient in contemporary debates on constitutional democracies. It focuses in particular on the experiences of India and Germany as examples of post-war and post-colonial constitutional democracies whose trajectories illustrate democratic transitions and transformative constitutionalism. While transformative constitutionalism has come to be associated specifically with the post-apartheid experience in South Africa, this book uses the transformative as an analytical framework to transcend the dichotomy of west and east and explore how temporally coincident constitutions have sought to install constitutional democracies by breaking with the past. While the constitution-making processes in the two countries were specific to their political contexts, the constitutional promises and futures converged. In this context, the book explores the themes of Constitutionalism, Nationalism, Secularism, Sovereignty and Rule of Law, Freedoms and Rights, to investigate how the contestations over democratic transitions and democratic futures have unfolded in the two democracies. It offers readers valuable insights into how the normative frameworks of constitutional democracy take concrete form at specific sites of democratic and constitutional imagination in Dalit and Islamic writings, as well as the relationship between state and religion in the writings of public intellectuals, political and legal philosophers. The book also focuses on specific sites of contestation in democracies including the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship in post-colonial India, free speech and sedition in liberal democracies, questions of land rights in connection with economic and political changes in contemporary contexts, and the rights of indigenous communities with regard to international conventions and domestic law. Given its scope, it will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, political philosophy,comparative constitutionalism, law and human rights.

The book analyzes different critical attitudes towards European integration from a multidisciplinary perspective. By applying both quantitative and normative-theoretical approaches, the contributors assess the causes and effects of the popularity of EU-critical positions and doctrines, such as souverainism, neo-nationalism and neo-populism. The book also presents country studies to compare populist movements and parties, such as the Five Stars Movement in Italy, Syriza in Greece and UKIP in the UK. It offers insights into the historical and normative roots of the diverse anti-European standpoints, and the various political demands and agendas connected with these views, ranging from rejections of EU institutions to demands for institutional reforms and propositions for alternative projects.

This book explores the idea of socialism from three angles and raises the questions if socialism is possible, inevitable, and desirable. Socialism as an economic and societal system was possible based on the two most important pillars of Marxian political economy: State ownership in the means of production and mandatory central planning (command economy). Nevertheless, these two characteristics are compatible only with dictatorship. On this basis, socialism is neither inevitable nor desirable, because it excludes competition, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.The three questions are analyzed through the academic work of five towering figures: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, and Hannah Arendt. The theoretical findings and inferences resulting from this analysis are compared with the reality of socialism as it existed rather than an imaginary uncontroversial blueprint of socialism.The bookdiscusses the evolution of Soviet communism and its attempts with market reforms to solve its inherent contradictions. It concludes that totalitarian regimes tend to fail in reforms because market freedom is inconsistent with totalitarian control. The author makes a strong case against dictatorship, also in the context of the spreading of nationalist populism around the globe. This book is a must-read for everybody interested in a better understanding of the ideas of socialism, totalitarianism, and populism.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of EU support between 2006 and 2015, and of electoral behavior during the European Parliament elections. In light of the Eurozone financial and debt crisis, it also examines how political and economic turbulences have affected EU citizens'stance on democracy and their support for EU institutions. It explores measures taken in the context of the Euro crisis management and the reactions of EU citizens, in order to shed new light on the determinants and developments of EU support. The author highlights the heterogeneity of the developments between the member states and identifies social, political, and economic facets of the crisis that have changed the ways citizens form their political attitudes towards the EU. The book delivers a profound account of the Euro crisis, integrating approaches from political economy, psychology, sociology, and public opinion research. It will appeal to scholars and anyone interested in learning more about the declining citizen support in the EU and the heterogeneous developments in the member states, which may significantly endanger the long-term existence of the European Union.

This book starts with four aspects - subject's cognition, way of thinking, political value and ideology, conducts comparative studies on political culture. Amid using the concept of political culture in western academic circles, it makes comprehensive supplement for this concept, and put forward an updated concept of political culture which is more localized. This new concept, on the grounds of the comparison with political system, takes political culture as the subjective side of political system and incorporates ideology into political culture, thus undoubtedly enriching our knowledge of political culture. On the basis of clarifying the concept of political culture and establishing the comparative dimension of it, this book widely refers to the outlooks of individuals, nations, society and power of political cognition; the modes of objectives, directions and methods of political ideas; democratic awareness, legal concept and system selection of political value; as well as liberalism and republicanism, etc. All these bring substantial benefits to promoting and deepening the comparative studies on political culture. This book can not only be used for the teaching undergraduate and graduates who major in Politics, but also used as the reference book for politics academic research.

This book questions how policies for the metropolis become Europeanised. The book analyses how spatial concepts and political ideas permeate the European multi-level system. Through an interpretive comparison of five contexts, the book provides an overview of the European orientation tracing two interdependent developments. First, the book examines references to ‘Europe'in national and subnational policies. In French and German policies, metropolitan regions are increasingly framed as being central not only for inter-municipal coordination, but also as nodes within the European space. Moreover, Europeanised metropolitan regions such as Lyon and Stuttgart develop European strategies. The second development shows how metropolitan regions appear as actors and issues in the European policy arena, contributing to a tentative and implicit metropolitan dimension. This multi-scalar analysis is of interest for scholars and practitioners specialised in metropolitan regions, European urban and regional policies, geography and related areas.

This book analyses the India, Brazil, South Africa Dialogue Forum (IBSA), focusing on the communalities and differences in the way foreign policy is conceptualized in its member states. Utilizing 83 interviews with foreign policy makers and experts, as well as the analysis of 119 foreign-policy speeches, the author traces key shifts in official foreign policy discourse. In order to evaluate the degree of support for key IBSA Dialogue Forum concepts within national discourse, the author also examines the interplay between official and broader societal discourses on foreign policy. This analysis combines political science factors (foreign policy role conceptions) with linguistic factors, thus enabling a qualitative and quantitative comparison of different framings of foreign policy. Extensive empirical material collected during six months of field research in India, Brazil and South Africa allows the author to present a differentiated account of their alleged like-mindedness.

Klaus von Beyme, a highly distinguished German political scientist, has been recognised as a “Pioneer in the Study of Political Theory and Comparative Politics”. When he received the highly esteemed Mattei Dogan Award during the XXII World Congress of Political Science in Madrid on 12 July 2012, in his laudatio Rainer Eisfeld portrayed Klaus v. Beyme as a “Global Scholar and Public Intellectual”. On the occasion of Klaus v. Beyme's 80th birthday this book offers a selection of his major previously published and new texts focusing on “Empirical Political Theory”, “The Evolution of Comparative Politics, Revival of Normative Political Theory in Empirical Research”, “Theodor W. Adorno - Political Theory as Theory of Aesthetics”, “Historical Forerunners of Policy Studies”, “Political Institutions – Old and New”, “Representative Democracy and the Populist Temptation”, “Political Advisors to Politicians”, and on “The Concept of Political Class: A New Dimension of Research on Elites?”.

​​Given the centrality of political parties in modern democracies, most research on these systems either directly address their internal functioning and activities or question their critical role. Political science has moved from describing institutions to the thorough analysis of behavior within these institutions and the interactions between them. The inevitable consequences of the maturing and institutionalization of the discipline of political science in many countries include the forming of sub-fields and specialized research communities. At the same time the number of democracies has vastly increased since the 1980s and although not each attempt at democratization was eventually successful, more heterogeneous systems with some form of party competition exist than ever before. As a consequence, the literature addressing the large issues of party democracy spreads over many research fields and has become difficult to master for individual students of party democracy and party governance. The present volume sets out to review the behavior and larger role of political parties in modern democracies. In so doing the book takes its departure from the idea that the main contribution of political parties to the working of democracy is their role as vehicles of political competition in systems of government. Consequently the focus is not merely in the internal functioning of political parties, but rather their behavior the electoral, legislative, and governmental arenas. Thus several chapters address how political parties perform within the existing institutional frameworks. One more chapter looks at the role of political parties in building and adapting these institutions. Finally, two chapters explicitly address the party contributions to democracy in established and new democracies, respectively.​​

George Tsebelis'veto players approach has become a prominent theory to analyze various research questions in political science. Studies that apply veto player theory deal with the impact of institutions and partisan preferences of legislative activity and policy outcomes. It is used to measure the degree of policy change and, thus, reform capacity in national and international political systems. This volume contains the analysis of leading scholars in the field on these topics and more recent developments regarding theoretical and empirical progress in the area of political reform-making. The contributions come from research areas of political science where veto player theory plays a significant role, including, positive political theory, legislative behavior and legislative decision-making in national and supra-national political systems, policy making and government formation. The contributors to this book add to the current scholarly and public debate on the role of veto players, making it of interest to scholars in political science and policy studies as well as policymakers worldwide.

While we cannot hope to provide definitive answers to these questions, as political scientists we proceed from the assumption that much can be learned through the application of the existing tools of comparative political analysis. Two of the incidents occurred in developing countries (one a parliamentary democracy, the other a democratizing presidential system), and one occurred in a highly developed presidential democracy. All three countries are federal systems, with multiple layers of environmental regulation, although sub-national government seems to be better institutionalized and more effective in the United States. Only one of the incidents occurred within the sovereign territory of a country with an effective federal environmental protection agency and highly transparent policy and judicial processes. None of the three nation-states involved has a strong “green” political party. And the affected communities in all three cases remain dissatisfied with the outcomes to varying degrees. What can we make of these observations? Is there a systematic relationship between them (or any other political, social, cultural or economic factors) and the responses to environmental crises by nation-states? To answer these questions a more systematic analysis of the attendant political processes is needed. Only then can we suggest whether hope or despair is a more appropriate reaction. 1. 2 Global Environmental Issues Since the 1960s, environmental issues have entered the agendas of most nation-states. Pollution of land, air, and water have endangered ecosystems and public health, and called for a governmental response.