Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

This handbook presents a comprehensive view of the current theory and research surrounding political elites, which is now a pivotal subject for academic study and public discourse. In 40 chapters by leading scholars, it displays the field's richness and diversity. The handbook is organized in six sections, each introduced by a co-editor, focusing on theories about political elites, methods for studying them, their main structural and behavioral patterns worldwide, the differentiation and integration of political elite sectors, elite attributes and resources, and the dilemmas of political elites in this century. Forty years since Robert Putnam's landmark Comparative Study of Political Elites, this handbook is an indispensable resource for scholars and students engaged in the study of this vibrant field.

"Who rules in Eastern Europe?" became a fundamental question for western researchers and other observers after communist regimes were established in the region, and it gained further importance as state socialism expanded into Central Europe after the Second World War. A political order which, according to Leninist theory of the state and to subsequent Stalinist political practice, was primarily a highly centralised and repressive power organisation, directed, as if it were natural, researchers attention towards the highest echelon of office holders in party and state. Extreme centralisation of power in these regimes was consequently linked to an elitist approach to analysing them from a distant viewpoint. It is one of the many paradoxes of state socialism, that a social and political order which presumptuously claimed to be the final destination of historical development and to be based on deterministic laws of social evolution, which claimed an egalitarian nature and denied the significance of the individual, was per ceived through the idiosyncrasies, rivalries and personal traits of its rulers. The largest part of these societies remained in grey obscurity, onlyoccasion ally revealing bits of valid information about a social life distant from the centres of power. It is debatable whether this top-headedness of western re search into communist societies created a completely distorted picture of re ality, however, it certainly contributed to an overestimation of the stability of these regimes, an underestimation of their factual diversity and a misjudge ment of the extent of conflicts and cleavages dividing them.

Wie unterscheidet sich die Bundesrepublik von anderen Landern auf der Ebene der Sozialstruktur, der Verhaltensweisen und Wertorientierungen? Welche Veranderungen haben sich in dieser Hinsicht in den letzten Jahren ereignet? Und welche Transformationsprozesse haben sich in den neuen Bundeslandern mit welchen Folgen vollzogen? Diese zentralen Fragen werden in diesem Band fur ausgewahlte Themenkomplexe auf der Grundlage neuer empirischer Studien behandelt."

Die Beitrage behandeln aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln einen durch die Begriffe Sozialwissenschaft-Informatik-Information abgegrenzten, interdisziplinaren Themenkomplex. Gerade in den Sozialwissenschaften haben die qualitative Textinterpretation und die Suche nach typischen, einzelnen Fallen ihren festen Stellenwert, und automatische Informationssuche und Informationsaufbereitung sind zu unverzichtbaren Forschungsinstrumenten geworden. Dieser Band enthalt eine Vielzahl von Fachbeitragen, die im Rahmen entsprechender Spezialveranstaltungen entstanden sind oder eigens fur diesen Band geschrieben wurden. Sowohl als Einfuhrungen wie auch im Rahmen spezieller Fragestellungen werden Ansatze aus den Gebieten kunstliche Intelligenz, Bilderkennung, Kommunikationsnetze, Hypertext, Szientometrie, Bibliometrie u. a., jeweils mit Bezug auf sozialwissenschaftliche Anwendung, vorgestellt."

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 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. It has been widely acknowledged that the process of European integration and unification was started and is still pursued as an elite project, designed to put an end to debilitating conflicts and rivalries by consolidating a common power base and by pooling Europe's economic resources. Nevertheless elites have remained the known unknowns of the European integration process. The present volume is designed to change this. Based on surveys of political and economic elites in 18 European countries, it is a comprehensive study of the visions, fears, cognitions and values of members of national parliaments and top business leaders underlying their attitudes towards European integration. It also investigates political and economic elites' embeddedness in transnational networks and their ability to communicate in multicultural settings. The book strongly supports the view of an elitist character of the process of European integration on the one hand, while challenging the idea that European national elites have merged or are even merging into a coherent Eurelite on the other. As the 11 chapters of this book show the process of European integration is much more colourful and even contradictory than concepts of a straight forward normative and structural integration suggest. In particular this process is deeply rooted in, and conditional on, the social and political settings in national contexts. The empirical basis for this book is provided by the data of the international IntUne project, which has for the first time created a comprehensive database combining coordinated surveys of Europe-related attitudes at the elite and general population level.

Democratic Representation in Europe: Diversity, Change and convergence explores representation as a core element of democracies in the modern era. Over the past 150 years parliamentary representation has developed into a main link between polity and society, and parliamentary representatives have come to form the nucleus of political elites. The twenty authors of the 16 chapters follow a comparative and empirical approach by exploiting the unique longitudinal data-base of the EURELITE project, which has gathered standardized evidence about the structures of parliamentary representation in 11 European countries and their development over time; in many countries over 160 years. Following on from an earlier book by the same editors (Parliamentary Representatives in Europe 1848-2000.) which focused on trends in single European countries, Democratic Representation in Europe pursues a trans-national approach by comparing the mechanisms and modes of parliamentary recruitment and career formation between the main party families and various categories of the population in European societies. Such cross-national analyses, which include a longitudinal account of female representation throughout modern European parliamentary history, have not been attempted before. The book concludes with longitudinal in-depth analyses of cleavage representation in European parliamentary history and of the impact of the institutional factor on political elites' transformations. Democratic Representation in Europe contributes to a better understanding of relations between social and political change, and of the importance of institutional factors in shaping the political elites of European democracies. In so doing it can help substantiate theoretical debates in the social and political sciences on issues such as historical institutionalism and path dependency.

This book brings together leading scholars in the field of electoral studies and political representation to examine the democratization of the recruitment of political representatives in Western Europe. The study deals with long-term changes in parliamentary recruitment and patterns of political careers in eleven European countries from the middle of the 19th century until 2000. The book provides the first ever truly comparative study of parliamentary representation in Europe.