Ethno-regionalist parties are an increasingly influential political phenomenon in many Western European countries. This volume provides an exploration of the successes and failures experienced by such parties in post-war Europe, looking in detail at the fortunes of 12 regionalist parties in the Basque country, Corsica, French-speaking Belgium, Scotland, Wales, Catalonia, Flanders, Italy and South Tyrol. Using these case studies and a common conceptual framework, the contributors focus on a number of factors that influence party identity and electoral and policy success. They also address other significant areas such as how the parties operate at the European Union level, their future evolution, and the implications for the party system and the larger political system of which they are a part.

Immigration, racism and nationalism have become hotly debated issues in the Western world. This highly original and controversial work focuses on the language used by the vast majority who regard themselves as being open to a multi-cultural society.
Using Belgium as a case study and drawing parallels with the UK, US, Europe and the former Yugoslavia, the authors analyse this language and reveal a remarkable consistency between these liberal voices, such as in news-reporting, and the language used by radical racist and nationalist groups.

Political parties are the fabric of democratic politics. In 1991 a new Russia emerged after seven decades of one-party dictatorship, claiming to be on the road towards democracy. In this volume the authors analyse the many contradictions, dilemmas, and paradoxes of reconstituting free party politics and democratic rule in a severely traumatized country. Frequently from a comparative perspective they deal with a range of topics, from the behaviour of the new parties in parliament, the role of ideology in cementing party organizations, to the character and prospects of the transient Russian party system.

First published in 1987. This examination of the career of John Wheatley indicates the way in which one Irishman - reared among Liberal and Radical coal miners and taught by Roman Catholic priests and nationalist leaders to regard obedience to the Catholic Church and promotion of Home Rule as the vital interests for Irish Catholics - became a Socialist and adapted his Radical political views and devotional Roman Catholic convictions to a Parliamentary and Catholic Socialism. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of British and Labour history.

First published in 1946. This title is a clear and concise account of the march of Labour to the control of the London County Council and its work at County Hall in the 1940s. This study explores the rise of the Labour Party in London and the changes and progress in health, education, and social welfare. Labour in London will be of interest to students of history and politics.

This volume features key political issues for 1990s Britain: the reform of the Labour party; the use of opinion polls; the impact of the media; European integration; Scotland and regional trends; and the bases of party support.

The tenth edition of this acclaimed text continues to provide a lively, comprehensive and up-to-date account of British political institutions, of the way in which they operate, and of the society in which they developed. It includes new sections on the following key areas:
* the monarchy and the House of Lords
* the 1997 general election
* the transformation of the Labour party and the demise of the Tories
* the European Union
* devolution
* the judicial system
* Northern Ireland.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203024397

The first book to provide a much-needed analysis of the current state of the party and insight into longer term trends, "New Labour in Power" helps readers to explore both past and present in order to better understand the future.
The book explores Tony Blair's victory through both its historical context and the words of contemporary media commentators, journalists, economists and politicians, including Austin Mitchell, Peter Shore, Peter Jay, A. H. Halsey and Vernon Bogdanor. It combines historical, political and practical approaches to the questions raised by the Labour election victory and addresses core themes such as Europe, the economy, welfare, education, defense and the constitution.

Bomberg argues the 'greening' of European politics and the advancement of European integration are inextricably linked and that the EU presents a strategic dilemma to Green parties. In short, how can Greens reconcile their radical, alternative politics with the EU's mainstream, traditional institutions and practices? Bomberg's analysis is based on over 100 interviews with leading green politicians, NGO members, environmental and industrial lobbyists, EU officials and MEPs. She includes appendices showing profiles of green parties in European countries, and key policy-making institutions

From the time of the Abyssinian crisis through to the outbreak of World War II in western Europe, the British government was marked by very diverse attitudes with regard to, and adopted diverse policies towards, the fascist dictators of Europe. This work provides a complete history of the Conservative Party from 1930 to 1940 and explores its responses to the problems of fascism. It details the historical context for the foreign policy of the period and examines the historiography of the Conservative Party. The author also includes a chronological outline of the international situation between Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the outbreak of war. Drawing on neglected sources, including little known diaries, memoirs and minutes, this book gives a new perspective on the Party's policies focusing on members of the government aside from just Chamberlain and highlights important aspects such as the controversy over national service. By exploiting new evidence and archives, the author provides alternative and original interpretations of the reactions of various elelments of the Conservative Party to the deepening international crisis.

Bomberg argues the 'greening' of European politics and the advancement of European integration are inextricably linked and that the EU presents a strategic dilemma to Green parties. In short, how can Greens reconcile their radical, alternative politics with the EU's mainstream, traditional institutions and practices? Bomberg's analysis is based on over 100 interviews with leading green politicians, NGO members, environmental and industrial lobbyists, EU officials and MEPs. She includes appendices showing profiles of green parties in European countries, and key policy-making institutions

Explores the impact interparty conflicts have on a party's coalition bargaining. Focusing on Denmark, Norway, the UK, Italy and France, the text investigates whether organizational imperatives of political parties play a role in interplay competition. The author challenges traditional views to show that the degree of centralization or decentralization of a party and the nature of the interparty conflict affects the party's elite to neutralize and pacify internal opposition. He argues that decentralized models provide a variety of ways to manage such conflict without members leaving the party or voicing dissent outside the party.

An electoral system is the most fundamental element of representative democracy, translating citizen's votes into representatives' seats. It is also the most potent practical instrument available to democratic reformers. This systematic and comprehensive study describes and classifies the 70 electoral systems used by 27 democracies - including those of Western Europe, Australia, Canada, the USA, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand - for 384 national legislative and European Parliament elections between 1945 and 1990. Using comparative and statistical analyses of these systems, Arend Lijphart demonstrates the effect of the electoral formula used, the number of representatives elected per district, electoral thresholds, and of five other key features of electoral systems on the proportionality of the election outcome, the degree of multipartism, and the creation of majority parties. In the process he reveals that electoral systems are neither as diverse nor as complex as is often assumed. Electoral Systems and Party Systems represents the most definitive treatment of the subject since Rae's classic study in 1967, based as it is on more accurate and comprehensive data (covering more countries and a longer time-span), and using stronger hypotheses and better analytical methods. The unique information and analysis it offers will make it essential reading for everyone working in the field.

Gennady Andreevich Zyuganov is the leader of Russia's resurgent Communist Party and was Boris Yeltsin's strongest challenger in the summer 1996 presidential elections. Although his face became familiar to the world at that time, his ideas and his program were mainly a subject of speculation. This book makes Zyuganov available to American readers for the first time -- in his own words.

A former village teacher from Orel Province, Zyuganov came to Moscow in the 1980s to work in the ideology department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to complete doctoral work in philosophy at Moscow State University. He is a prolific writer who has rebuilt the Communist party on his vision of a Russian socialist great power. Today he leads the Communist faction in the Duma and is chairman of the united opposition movement -- the National Patriotic Union.

This volume is a compilation of Zyuganov's writings on Russia's past and present and her place in the world; Russia's fate under the leadership of Gorbachev and Yeltsin; his own vision of Russia's future under a new Communist leadership; and his reflections on the 1996 presidential election.

Here is the first book to cover the history of British Liberalism from its founding doctrines in the later eighteenth century to the final dissolution of the Liberal party into the Liberal Democrats in 1988. The Party dominated British politics for much of the later nineteenth-century, most notably under Gladstone, whose premierships spanned 1868-1894, and during the early twentieth, but after the resignation of Lloyd George in 1922 the Liberal Party never held office again. The decline of the Party remains a unique phenomenon in British politics and Alan Sykes illuminates its dramatic and peculiar circumstances in this comprehensive study.

In this introduction to the theme of political parties, attention is given to those theoretical works that have the most direct bearing on the subject. To illustrate these theoretical ideas, the book applies comparative approaches to the British case. The book focuses on concepts which highlight various "trade offs" confronting party leadership and their impact on party behaviour. It addresses concepts that relate to competitive parties - party institutionalization, organizational models, intra-party competition, and the impact of intra-party conflicts on party behaviour. The latter aspect takes the reader through to the second part of the book, namely competitive party systems. Here, notions that pertain to multiparty electoral competition, the impact of regional integration on a party's behaviour, issue orientation, and party system change are discussed. Students taking courses on political parties should find this book a useful introduction to the basic conceptual paradigms and salient theories of the topic.

After winning the vote in 1918, many thousands of working class women joined the Labour Party and Co-operative Movement. This book is about their struggle to find a place in the male world of organised labour politics. In the twenties, labour women challenged male leaders to give them equal status and support for their reform programmes, but the ideas were rejected. For most labour women, dedication to the class cause far outweighed their desire for power, and the struggle for 'women-power' was abandoned. Consequently, despite the common reform agendas of labour women and the middle class feminists of the era, a working alliance was never achieved. Labour Women uses oral and questionnaire testimony to draw a portrait of grass-roots activists. It contrasts labour women's failure to win power in the national organisations with their great achievements in community politics, poor law administration and municipal government.

The patent disconnection between the institutions of the European Union and the citizens of Europe has been widely attributed by political leaders and scholars to a 'communications gap', that is, to the way EU affairs are mediated by the media, and to the apparent lack of interest by national elites in conveying the importance of Europe. This book challenges this 'mediation theory' and suggests instead a cultural and systemic explanation for the distant and bureaucratic character of the European Union. Apportioning the blame for the communication gap to the media and national politicians neglects two real deficits which prevent Europe from enjoying a vibrant public sphere: a deficit of domesticisation, a popular disconnection with the idea of the EU, and a deficit of politicisation with European politics, it being difficult to categorise as through traditional methods of 'left vs. right'. This book suggests that popular disengagement with the EU is a consequence of the fact that Europe as a cultural community is an interdependent continent rather than a nation and that, as an political institution, the EU is a pseudo-confederation full of anti-publicity bias, elite-driven integration, corporatism and diplomacy. The result is a book that is an essential read for students and scholars of political communication and of the European Union.

Emerging as a formidable opposition party in Taiwan in 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is now a major challenger on the island's political scene. This text presents a dialogue between DPP's policy-makers and the leading critics from the international scholarly community.

Emerging as a formidable opposition party in Taiwan in 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is now a major challenger on the island's political scene. This text presents a dialogue between DPP's policy-makers and the leading critics from the international scholarly community.

Published in 1998. Was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) a typical Social Democratic party in tune with the programmatic principles of the Second International? What is the appropriate context within which the strategies of 'historic compromise' and Eurocommunism in the 1970s can be analyzed and understood? In what form and to what extent has the process of European integration and the crisis of Keynesianism contributed to the transformation of the party in 1989-91? What caused the collapse of the ruling political class of the First Italian Republic? Why did the transformed PCI, the PDS (Democratic Party of the Left), fail to lead the transition to the Second Italian Republic between 1992 and 1996? Is there any link between the party's historical factions and the current divisions in the Italian Left? Is it possible to theorize and speculate upon these divisions? Italy, Europe, the Left seeks to answer these questions, debating conventional views and examining the extent to which the end of the Cold War has contributed to a redefinition of the Left's identity in Italy and Europe. The exemplary methodological framework and the wider European perspective adopted throughout, make the book an indispensable reading in the field of Italian and European politics.

The first book of its kind to provide an accessible overview of the changes Citizens United brought to political campaigns and political representation, it combines rigorous academic research with many examples of ongoing trends from the campaign trail. Even though campaign finance involves complex legal issues, the book is set up to be engaging for both students of political campaigns and American politics, as well as civically engaged citizens who want to learn more about outside groups and their impact on campaigns and public policy. The book makes the case that Super PACs and dark money groups qualify as game changers of political campaigns not only because of what these groups can do independently from candidates and their increasing ability to match or even exceed candidates' financial resources, but because their actions influence the political incentives and strategies of candidates and political parties. We also point out evidence that those changes go beyond campaigns-they affect how legislators represent their constituents; how donors put pressure on lawmakers to adopt certain legislation after outside groups supported them; how the regulatory environment can benefit donors as a result of actions taken by federal agencies to repeal or dismantle existing laws; and how extreme positions by politicians can be incentivized and progress stalled when megadonors and outside groups reward political ideologues. Our hope is that this text inspires readers to draw their own conclusions about the effects the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has had and continues to have on the inner workings of American democracy. Some may even feel moved to take action that will empower ordinary citizens who want to have more of a voice in the democratic process. Given the high stakes associated with elections and the political changes they can bring due to the highly polarized political environment we live in, we believe that this book will add value to not only courses focusing on campaigns, elections, interest groups, and political communication, but also other courses such as introductory American Government courses.

Fourteen general elections have been held in Britain in the post-war period, from Clement Attlee's surprise sweep to power in 1945 to the Conservatives' fourth consecutive victory in 1992. Several of these fourteen landmark events in British political history had unexpected results; all had far-reaching consequences.

In this fully revised and updated edition of "British General Elections Since 1945" David Butler chronicles the demeanor and result of each post-war election. He also draws on the most recent research to examine how much the way in which elections have been staged and fought has altered, with press conferences, advertizing, opinion polls and media events transforming the electoral process. In considering these issues alongside other aspects - the law, the constituencies, the electoral system itself, voter behavior - Dr Butler provides an invaluable guide to the continuities and change which have characterized British general elections for two generations.

Attlee is undoubtedly one of the key figures in modern British history. An important figure in Churchill's War Cabinet, and premier of the first majority Labour Government, he created the Welfare State, nationalised a substantial part of industry and secured the independence of India. Yet his political stature remains unresolved. Was he Churchill's "modest man with much to be modest about" who squandered the fruits of victory, or, as many now claim, one of the truly great prime ministers? Robert Pearce's lucid and drily amusing study goes behind the stern exterior to find ambition and indecision, and a uniquely moral vision.

A major new edition of this introductory survey of the two main political parties, from the rise of the Liberal Party under Gladstone until the period of Conservative domination under Salisbury in the late nineteenth century. As well as assessing the impact of major political landmarks such as the Great Reform Acts, it also describes the nineteenth century political scene.