Is today's left really new? How has the European radical left evolved? Giorgos Charalambous answers these questions by looking at three moments of rapid political change - the late 1960s to late 1970s; the turn of the millennium; and post-2008. He challenges the conventional understanding of a 'new left', drawing out continuities with earlier movements and parties. Charalambous examines the 'Long '68', symbolised by the May uprisings in France, which saw the rise of new left forces and the widespread criticism by younger radical activists of traditional communist and socialist parties. He puts this side by side with the turn of the millennium when the Global Justice Movement rose to prominence and changed the face of the international left, and also the period after the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of anti-austerity politics which initiated the most recent wave of new left parties such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. With a unique 'two-level' perspective, Charalambous approaches the left through both social movements and party politics, looking at identities, rhetoric and organisation, and bringing a fresh new approach to radical history, as well as assessing challenges for both activists and scholars.

With a combined focus on social democrats in Northern and Southern Europe, this book crucially broadens our understanding of the transformation of European social democracy from the mid-1970s to the early-1990s. In doing so, it revisits the transformation of this ideological family at the end of the Cold War, and before the launch of Third Way politics, and examines the dynamics and power relations at play among European social democratic parties in a context of nascent globalisation. The chronological, methodological and geographical approaches adopted allow for a more nuanced narrative of change for European social democracy than the hitherto dominant centric perspective. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of social democracy, the European Centre-left, political parties, ideologies and more broadly to comparative politics and European politics and history. The Introduction chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Authored by a stellar line-up of top China scholars from the US, Europe, Australia and China. Interdisciplinary in approach, so will appeal to courses on Chinese society, politics and history. Writing style is excellent and the chapters are truly connected due to the bok being co-authored.

By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China's (CCP's) impact on social change in China between 1978 and 2021. This book explores in depth the CCP's programme of reform and openness that had a dramatic impact on China's socio-economic trajectory following the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It also goes on to chart the acceptance of Market Socialism, highlighting the resulting emergence of a larger middle class, while also appreciating the profound consequences this created for workers and peasants. Additionally, this volume examines the development of the dominant class which remains a defining feature of China's political economy and the Party-state. Providing an in-depth analysis of class as understood by the CCP in conjunction with sociological interpretations of socio-economic and socio-political change, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese History, Asian Politics, and Asian studies.

By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China's (CCP's) impact on social change in China between 1978 and 2021. This book explores in depth the CCP's programme of reform and openness that had a dramatic impact on China's socio-economic trajectory following the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It also goes on to chart the acceptance of Market Socialism, highlighting the resulting emergence of a larger middle class, while also appreciating the profound consequences this created for workers and peasants. Additionally, this volume examines the development of the dominant class which remains a defining feature of China's political economy and the Party-state. Providing an in-depth analysis of class as understood by the CCP in conjunction with sociological interpretations of socio-economic and socio-political change, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese History, Asian Politics, and Asian studies.

This book examines the working procedures of parliamentary party groups within specialised committees - the backstage but primary means for MPs to influence policy. It explains which MPs specialise in particular policy areas, how they make policy choices in committees, and, subsequently, how these individual decisions are aggregated and 'unified' within and via parliamentary party groups. In doing so, the book expertly reveals the internal working procedures of parliaments and the role of individual MPs vis-a-vis the parliamentary party group leadership. Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 committee assignments and over 100 in-depth interviews with MPs, it shows that individual experts in committees have a central role and decision-making power which is more varied and decentralised from the leadership than commonly assumed. It demonstrates that most policy decisions are prepared bottom-up rather than dictated top-down and that parliamentary party groups are not strictly hierarchical organisations dominated by elites. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of legislative and parliamentary studies, representative democracy, comparative politics, and journalists and practitioners within parliaments.

Across Western Europe, the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath not only brought economic havoc but also, in turn, intense political upheaval. Many of the political manifestations of the crisis seen in other Western and especially Southern European countries also hit Spain, where challenger parties caused unprecedented parliamentary fragmentation, resulting in four general elections in under four years from 2015 onwards. Yet Spain, a decentralised state where extensive powers are devolved to 17 regions known as 'autonomous communities', also stood out from its neighbours due to the importance of the territorial dimension of politics in shaping the political expression of the crisis. This book explains how and why the territorial dimension of politics contributed to shaping party system continuity and change in Spain in the aftermath of the financial crisis, with a particular focus on party behaviour. The territorial dimension encompasses the demands for ever greater autonomy or even sovereignty coming from certain parties within the historic regions of the Basque Country, Catalonia and, to a lesser extent, Galicia. It also encompasses where these historic regions sit within the broader dynamics of intergovernmental relations across Spain's 17 autonomous communities in total, and how these dynamics contribute to shaping party strategies and behaviour in Spain. Such features became particularly salient in the aftermath of the financial crisis since this coincided with, and indeed accelerated, the rise of the independence movement in Catalonia.

Elections in America provides a thorough and objective explanation of American elections at the local, state, and national levels. It discusses laws and practices that govern elections, the history of elections and voting rights, and contemporary voting controversies. Elections in America is an all-in-one resource for understanding the many facets of elections and voting trends since the United States came into being. It explains how, when, and why the franchise expanded in fits and starts after America's founding and the various controversies over voting rights and vote counting that swirl around elections today. It reviews the major landmark court decisions that have impacted electoral politics, discusses how America's two-party system has shaped elections, and provides information on major organizations, groups, and people battling over voting rights and election laws. In addition, this resource provides a suite of original essays from election scholars on different aspects of U.S. electoral politics, as well as a carefully curated selection of primary documents illuminating important developments in American election history. The book also contains a comprehensive annotated list of academic resources to guide the reader towards further research on topics of interest. Provides clear overviews of how local, state, and federal elections work in the United States Includes coverage of present-day voting controversies and challenges related to voting rights, voter fraud, and election results Details important laws and court decisions that have expanded or reduced access to the ballot box in American history Presents a range of perspectives on voting issues, practices, and laws

Since its release in 1980, Kay Lawson's Political Parties and Linkage: A Comparative Perspective has become a classic text in the field of political science. In her groundbreaking work Lawson approaches linkage from an angle left unexplored by her predecessors. Her thinking filled in the systematic and theoretical void by envisioning political parties as the link between citizens and policy makers. This collection of essays by leading political scientists reflects on Lawson's concept of linkage, its theory, and its application over the last quarter century. The work is divided into two sections, the first covers linkage's impact on party research and the second focuses on its application in general political science. The first looks at such topics as the evolution and intellectual development of Lawson's concept through social actors, policy responsiveness, and multi-layer politics. The second handles issues like globalization, the relation of state and society, the European Union and it's proposed constitutional reform, and the cross-cultural significance of linkage in such countries as India. The book concludes with an illuminating chapter by Lawson that responds to the featured themes and explains her current views on linkage and democracy.

Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is often overlooked in this political development is the work of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a formative influence in the growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist party in Britain. Although it recovered after the First World War, rising to between 37,000 and 55,000 members, it came into conflict with the Labour Party and two Labour governments over their gradualist approach to socialism. This eventually led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 and its subsequent fragmentation into pro-Labour, pro-communist and independent groups. Its new revolutionary policy divided its members, as did the Abyssinian crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials. By the end of the 1930s, seeking to re-affiliate to the Labour Party, it had been reduced to 2,000 to 3,000 members, was a sect rather than a party and had earned Hugh Dalton's description that it was the 'ILP flea'. In the following monograph, Keith Laybourn analyses the dynamic shifts in this history across 25 years. This scholarship will prove foundational for scholars and researchers of modern British history and socialist thought in the twentieth century.

A media system does not exist in a vacuum. It develops and grows within social, political and economic systems. They interact with and influence one another, as well as stimulate each other's development. The main subject of this work is the dynamically evolving Polish media system, which is under the influence of institutions and external stakeholders. Thanks to this, it is easier to understand that the "crossroads" is not only a problem of the Polish media system, but a global one. For this reason, a comparative perspective is employed. Three chapters help to provide an answer to research questions dedicated to political parallelism and journalistic professionalization. The analysis would be limited and unrepresentative if the book enclosed it with one country's border, omitting the broad global, European and Centro-European context.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the state of political institutions, the military establishment and political parties in Pakistan. It provides a nuanced understanding of the practices of disenfranchisement by theocratic governments in the country which has relegated the people to the margins of their society. The volume provides an in-depth account of the political history of Pakistan focusing not only on national politics and foreign policy but also on their congruences with subnational systems of governance, the criminal justice system, bureaucracy, the electoral system and the police. It discusses challenging issues plaguing the country such as the continued dominance of the military, lagging economic development, lack of accountability within political institutions, sectarianism and terrorism. The author dissects and critically examines Pakistan's hegemonic politics and underlines the need for a new social contract based on the principles of inclusiveness and equality. The volume offers fresh perspectives on the multifaceted problems in Pakistan's politics. It will be of great interest to policy practitioners and to academics and students of politics, law and governance, sociology, international relations, comparative politics, Pakistan studies and South Asia studies.

1) This is a data rich comprehensive volume on elections in India from 1952-2019. 2) It discusses important facets of institutions and voting analysis in both regional and national elections. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of South Asian studies and India studies across UK and USA.

This book examines the process of presidentialisation of political parties in the Western Balkans. The Western Balkan countries deserve to be analysed in a comparative perspective due to their distinctive features in terms of processes of democratization, forms of government and institutional assets, the presence of social cleavages (religious, linguistic, ethnic), and, of course, the nature of political parties which differs from other European cases, especially in terms of origins, organization and structure. However, Western Balkan political parties do show certain similarities with other West European cases where power is centralised and held by the parties' leadership. The book ultimately attempts to test whether and to what extent the influence of institutional variables affects the level of presidentialisation of political parties, also considering the parties' organization features.

'The book offers a broad survey of political partiesaEURO (TM) financing strategies in Southeast Asia.'Contemporary Southeast AsiaPolitical activities, the running of party organisations, branches and headquarters, and especially election campaigns, are becoming increasingly costly, and no party can survive without money. Political power provides access to funding from public and private sources. Political parties have become more and more like businesses, including the temptation to maximise the income and the war chests, thus opening the doors for vested interests and influence peddling. As a result, money politics is pervasive, and the public is becoming increasingly critical of it. Trust in political parties, politicians, governments, and key state institutions has fallen to unprecedented levels. In most countries in the region general and political corruption, graft, and influence peddling are all too visible for the voters, while good governance remains an ideal too often out of reach.This book, Power Broking in the Shade: Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia, provides an overview of the strategies for financial survival of the parties in the region and the importance of stable cash flows for their political success. The book fills the void of a comparative approach towards party financing that covers the whole of ASEAN and offers accessible facts and understandable analysis for anyone interested in the politics of Southeast Asia.

This book examines the history of the Palestinian Left by focusing on the trajectory of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during its declining phase. Relying on a substantial corpus of primary sources, this study illustrates how the PFLP's political agency contributed to its own marginalisation within the Palestinian national movement. Following the 1982 eviction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Lebanon, the bases of the PFLP's opposition to Fatah's primacy in the national movement were jeopardised. This book argues that the PFLP's "loyalty" to the PLO institutional and political framework prevented the formulation of a real counterhegemonic political project. This drove the PFLP's action to suffer a fundamental contradiction undermining its stance within the national movement. In the attempt to continue its opposition to Fatah, while maintaining integration in the Palestinian mainstream, the PFLP's agency fluctuated, compromising its effectiveness and credibility. Apparently irreversible, the PFLP's marginalisation is a factor fostering the current Palestinian impasse, as no alternative is emerging to break the thirteen-year long Hamas-Fatah polarisation.

To reclaim a sense of hope for the future, German activists in the late twentieth century engaged ordinary citizens in innovative projects that resisted alienation and disenfranchisement. By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politics-a society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. Berlin's History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. A rigorous but inspiring tale of hope in action, Sustainable Utopias makes the case that it is still worth believing in human creativity and the labor of citizenship.

This book places the 2012 election in Florida in historical context and provides an explanation for the outcome of the races involved. The book offers descriptions of the races for President, US Senate, US Congress and the Florida State Legislature as well as explanations for the outcomes of these races. The description and analysis uses empirical data on voter registration, voter turnout, and exit polls taken by major national news organizations. Voting behavior in the presidential race in Florida is compared to that in other states.

The idea of 'New India' has acquired a new currency. The dominant grammar of politics dilutes the critical impulse and deters the expression of alternate politics. The interpretive possibilities have been replaced by a reactive exchange. Technology is presented as a panacea, rather than just a facilitator. Legitimacy and normative dignity for these ideas is acquired by redefining the role of the institutions and also through constitutional amendments. A major intellectual effort is required to reformulate public policy, governance systems and social relations to balance the opposite claims of market efficiency and economic growth with social equity and justice. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Offering the first in-depth analysis of the relationship between populism and political meritocracy, this book asks why states with meritocratic systems such as Singapore and China have not faced the populist challenge to the extent that liberal-democratic states have. Is political meritocracy immune to populism? Or does it fan its flames? Exploring this puzzle, the authors argue that political meritocracies are simultaneously immune and susceptible to populism. The book maintains that political meritocracy's focus on the intellect, social skills, and most importantly virtue of political leaders can reduce the likelihood of populist actors rising to power; that meritocracy's promise of upward mobility for the masses can work against elitism; and that rule by the 'meritorious' can help avoid crises, diminishing the political opening for populism. However, it also shows that meritocracy does little to eliminate grievances around political, cultural, and social inequality, instead entrenching a hierarchy - an allegedly 'just' one. The book ultimately argues that the more established the system of political meritocracy becomes, the more it opens the door to populist resentment and revolt. Pitched primarily to scholars and postgraduate students in political theory, comparative politics, Asian studies, and political sociology, this book fills an important scholarly gap.

When it was originally published in 1984, Militant was widely acclaimed as a masterly work of investigative journalism. Although the rise of Jeremy Corbyn is to be attributed to more than hard-left entrism, to some within the party, Crick's book must seem like a lesson from history.Militant was a secret Trotskyite organisation that consistently denied being a party, though at its peak in the mid-1980s it could boast around 8,000 members, all of whom also belonged to the Labour Party. Militant operated clandestinely inside the Labour Party, edging out moderates at grass-roots level and recruiting people to its own ranks. Whilst eventually most of its leaders were expelled, it caused damaging rifts within Labour. Crick's book explores the origins, organisation and aims of Militant. It also explores the famous boss politics of Derek Hatton and Militant in Liverpool, and the party hierarchy's determined and ultimately successful attempts to squash the tendency.An important historical document, it is today seen as a field guide to how hard-left factions can infiltrate the Labour party, with some in the centre of the party allegedly urging its supporters to treat the long unavailable book as a 'war manual'.

Lewis Minkin has immense experience of the Labour Party and has acted as adviser to two major internal reviews of the internal party organisation. As the author of two widely acclaimed and original studies on the Labour Party, The Labour Party Conference and The Contentious Alliance, he possesses an unrivalled grasp of the subtleties and nuances of Labour's internal relationships. The Blair Supremacy is groundbreaking in its investigation of the processes, methods, character and politics of party management, during a period when Blair strengthened his own position as he and his allies and managers drove the party through a ferment of new developments under the name 'New Labour'. For this book Minkin has been able to draw on a wealth of sources unavailable to other scholars. What is uncovered here is revealing and at times startling. It includes an extensive covert internal organisation, a culture which facilitated manipulation and what can be described as a rolling coup. These developments are rigorously and critically examined with a strong focus on three fundamental questions: How were these changes achieved? Was it, as it was often represented, a complete supremacy? Why did it end so badly with Blair being forced, in effect, to step down? The study challenges many misconceptions and sheds new light on the Blair legacy and on the intense controversies surrounding him. It also adds greatly to our understanding of some acute contemporary problems in British political life. -- .

The volume sheds light on the backsliding process of Turkish democratization from the early 2010's until 2018. In addition to historical contextualization, the book analyzes data collected through a nationally representative survey of Turkish voters during the 2018 elections and data available by the Supreme Election Board (YSK) in a pre-and post-election panel design. A more centralized administration of elections that are directly under the control of the central government brought reliability of election results as well as the free and fair nature of the elections in question. Mobilization efforts of the parties, as well as the varying degree of influence of the economy, appear to have simultaneously influential over the vote choices. Yet another factor of potency in shaping the vote choices was the longer-term effects of ideology, conservative values, and hence the party identification. Through the 2018 elections in Turkey, the book provides an excellent glimpse into the dynamics of Turkish politics, society and culture. Targeting students and scholars of Middle Eastern and North African politics, the book is a key resource for any readers interested in the political developments of Turkey, comparative politics, and voting behavior.

With the rise of both populist parties and social movements in Europe, the role of emotions in politics has once again become key to political debates, and particularly in the Spanish case. Since 2011, the Spanish political landscape has been redrawn. What started as the Indignados movement has now transformed into the party Podemos, which claims to address important deficits in popular representation. By creating space for emotions, the movement and the party have made this a key feature of their political subjectivity. Emotions and affect, however, are often viewed as either purely instrumental to political goals or completely detached from 'real' politics. This book argues that the hierarchy between the rational and the emotional works to sediment exclusionary practices in politics, deeming some forms of political expressions more worthy than others. Using radical theories of democracy, Emmy Eklundh masterfully tackles this problem and constructs an analytical framework based on the concept of visceral ties, which sees emotions and affect as constitutive of any collective identity. She later demonstrates empirically, using both ethnographic method and social media analysis, how the movement Indignados is different from the political party Podemos with regards to emotions and affect, but that both are suffering from a broader devaluation of emotional expressions in political life. Bridging social and political theory, Emotions, Protest, Democracy: Collective Identities in Contemporary Spain provides one of the few in-depth accounts of the transition from the movement Indignados to party Podemos, and the role of emotions in contemporary Spanish and European politics.

Although party membership has been extensively analysed in the EU Members States from Western and Eastern Europe, there is a gap in systematic data collection and analyses for the other countries in the Balkans and post-Soviet region. This book provides new and innovative insights in the area of party membership research to analyse the evolution of membership organizations in political parties from under-investigated countries. Specifically, it seeks to understand the way in which political parties and the national legislation conceptualize the notion of membership within and across countries. It provides original data and affords a first comprehensive, comparative study of party members in the EU neighbouring countries, which resonate particular interest because some of them occupy the "precarious middle ground between a full-fledge democracy and outright dictatorship". In light of these relevant observations, this systematic analysis of membership evolutions in democratizing countries brings valuable insights for the study of party politics in general. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party systems, party organisation and elections, post-Soviet and East European politics and more broadly to democratization studies and comparative politics.