Coalitions are the commonest kind of democratic government, occurring frequently in most countries of Western Europe. It is usually assumed that political parties came together in a government coalition because they agree already, or can manage to reach an agreement, on the policy it should pursue. This book checks this idea out, in 12 countries of Western Europe plus Israel, using evidence from party election programmes and government programmes. It demonstrates that party policies do influence government programmes, but not to the extent they would if policy-agreement were the sole basis of coalition.

With drastic action needing to be taken now, rather than over the 30 years to 2050, this book addresses the crucial question of how to get action from governments who will always put short-term considerations (e.g. post Covid economic growth) over longer term climate priorities - unless forced to do otherwise. How might governments be persuaded to implement policies that will result in effective action? And how can this be achieved at an international, as well as national, level? These are the questions that this book focuses on. Taking a systematic political science point of view and drawing on collective choice and other theories of political action, this book analyses the key political and economic dynamics shaping climate policies around the world, identifying major political opportunities that can be exploited by well-informed and determined political actors, such as NGOs and social movements. This book describes how to advance and accelerate climate action around the world and will be of interest internationally to climate change campaigners, activists, political and environmental scientists.

This bold venture into political theory and comparative politics combines traditional concerns about democracy with modern analytical methods. It asks how contemporary democracies work, an essential stage in asking how they can be justified. An answer to both questions is found in the idea of the median mandate. The voter in the middle - the voice of the majority - empowers the centre party in parliament to translate his or her preferences into public policy. The median mandate provides a unified theory of democracy - pluralist, consensus, majoritarian, liberal, and populist - by replacing each qualified 'vision' with an integrated account of how representative institutions work. The unified theory is put to the test with comprehensive cross-national evidence covering 21 democracies from 1950 through to 1995. This exciting book will be of interest to specialists and general readers alike, representing as it does a reaffirmation of traditional democratic practice in an uncertain and threatening world. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. The General Editors are Max Kaase, Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean, School of Humanities and Social Science, International University, Bremen, Germany; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Southampton. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.

"The New British Politics" is one of the most comprehensive and successful introductions to British politics ever published. Now available in a fully revised and updated fourth edition, this clear, lively and authoritative text has an emphasis on law and order and the historical context of British politics. Written by internationally-known specialists, the book combines incisive and original analysis with direct presentation.

Comprehensive and accessible coverage of key aspects of the British political system, written by a team of distinguished scholars. Originally published in 1983, this third edition has been fully revised and updated.

This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives instructions on how to access the data on your own computer. For comparative purposes, similar estimates of policy and preferences are given for CEE, OECD and EU countries. These estimates update the prize-winning data set covered in Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998 - also published by OUP. A must-buy for all commentators, students and analysts of democracy, in Eastern Europe and the world.

The New British Politics is one of the most comprehensive and successful introductions to British politics ever published. Now available in a fully revised and updated fourth edition, this clear, lively and authoritative text has an emphasis on law and order and the historical context of British politics. Written by internationally-known specialists, the book combines incisive and original analysis with direct presentation.

A pioneering textbook which explains the dynamics of politics across Europe in the post-Cold war era. Comparing democratisation, transition to a market economy and increasing economic and political integration in the countries of central and eastern Europe with experiences in Scandinavia, and southern and western Europe, the book provides a wealth of information and analysis on the state of Europe at the end of a momentous century of European and World history.

This bold venture into democratic theory offers a new and reinvigorating thesis for how democracy delivers on its promise of public control over public policy. In theory, popular control could be achieved through a process entirely driven by supply-side politics, with omniscient and strategic political parties converging on the median voter's policy preference at every turn. However, this would imply that there would be no distinguishable political parties (or even any reason for parties to exist) and no choice for a public to make. The more realistic view taken here portrays democracy as an ongoing series of give and take between political parties' policy supply and a mass public's policy demand. Political parties organize democratic choices as divergent policy alternatives, none of which is likely to satisfy the public's policy preferences at any one turn. While the one-off, short-run consequence of a single election often results in differences between the policies that parliaments and governments pursue and the preferences their publics hold, the authors construct theoretical arguments, employ computer simulations, and follow up with empirical analysis to show how, why, and under what conditions democratic representation reveals itself over time. Democracy, viewed as a process rather than a single electoral event, can and usually does forge strong and congruent linkages between a public and its government. This original thesis offers a challenge to democratic pessimists who would have everyone believe that neither political parties nor mass publics are up to the tasks that democracy assigns them. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The Comparative Politics series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.

The relevance of this book to central concerns of political and social science hardly needs emphasizing. Parties are the organizing force of democratic governments, giving coherence and direction to their policies and relating them to popular preferences. Election programmes are crucial to this role, providing electors with some insight into the policies they are voting for, and parties themselves with a starting point for their activity in government. Discussion begins with a comparative assessment of the impact of election pledges on government action. The book goes on to describe systematically the place of the programmes in the political process of nineteen democracies. It subjects them to detailed qualitative, quantitative and spatial analyses to answer such questions as: Who prepares election programmes and how? What is the nature of modern party divisions? Do they differ across countries? Is there indeed an 'end of ideology' or an intensification? Does the need to attract votes weaken old partisan attachments? Combining individual studies of each country with comparative analyses on a scale never previously undertaken, the book will interest country specialists and comparativists and prove indispensable to research on voting and party behaviour, coalition formation, ideology, and rational choice.

This comprehensive introduction to politics provides an essential template for assessing the health and workings of present day democracy by exploring how democratic processes bring public policy into line with popular preferences. Incorporating the latest findings from Big Data across the world, it provides a crucial framework showing students how to deploy these for themselves, providing straightforward, practical orientation to the scope and methods of modern political science. Key features: Everyday politics is explained through concrete applications to democracies across the world; Predictive theories illuminate what goes on at various levels of democracy; Outlines - in easy to understand terms - the basic statistical approaches that enable empirically-informed analysis; Rich textual features include chapter summaries, reviews, key points, illustrative briefings, key concepts, project and essay suggestions, relevant reading all clearly explained in 'How to Use This Book'; Provides a firm basis for institutional and normative approaches to democratic politics; Concluding section reviews other approaches to explaining politics, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Politics is an essential resource for students of political science and of key interest to economics, public policy analysis and more broadly the social sciences.

The relevance of this book to central concerns of political and social science hardly needs emphasizing. Parties are the organizing force of democratic governments, giving coherence and direction to their policies and relating them to popular preferences. Election programmes are crucial to this role, providing electors with some insight into the policies they are voting for, and parties themselves with a starting point for their activity in government. Discussion begins with a comparative assessment of the impact of election pledges on government action. The book goes on to describe systematically the place of the programmes in the political process of nineteen democracies. It subjects them to detailed qualitative, quantitative and spatial analyses to answer such questions as: Who prepares election programmes and how? What is the nature of modern party divisions? Do they differ across countries? Is there indeed an 'end of ideology' or an intensification? Does the need to attract votes weaken old partisan attachments? Combining individual studies of each country with comparative analyses on a scale never previously undertaken, the book will interest country specialists and comparativists and prove indispensable to research on voting and party behaviour, coalition formation, ideology, and rational choice.

Coalitions are the commonest kind of democratic government, occurring frequently in most countries of western Europe. It is usually assumed that political parties came together in a government coalition because they agree already, or can reach an agreement, on the policy it should pursue. This book examines this idea using evidence from party election programmes and government programmes. It demonstrates that party policies do influence government programmes, but not to the extent they would if policy-agreement were the sole basis of coalition.

This comprehensive introduction to politics provides an essential template for assessing the health and workings of present day democracy by exploring how democratic processes bring public policy into line with popular preferences. Incorporating the latest findings from Big Data across the world, it provides a crucial framework showing students how to deploy these for themselves, providing straightforward, practical orientation to the scope and methods of modern political science. Key features: Everyday politics is explained through concrete applications to democracies across the world; Predictive theories illuminate what goes on at various levels of democracy; Outlines - in easy to understand terms - the basic statistical approaches that enable empirically-informed analysis; Rich textual features include chapter summaries, reviews, key points, illustrative briefings, key concepts, project and essay suggestions, relevant reading all clearly explained in 'How to Use This Book'; Provides a firm basis for institutional and normative approaches to democratic politics; Concluding section reviews other approaches to explaining politics, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Politics is an essential resource for students of political science and of key interest to economics, public policy analysis and more broadly the social sciences.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

The Manifesto data are the only comprehensive set of policy indicators for social, economic and political research. It is thus vital that their quality is established. The purpose of this book is to review methodological issues that have got in the way of straightforwardly using the Manifesto data since our two preceding volumes were published and to resolve them in ways which best serve users and textual analysts in general. The book is thus generally about text-based quantitative analysis with a particular focus on the quality of the CMP-MARPOR data and ways of assessing and using them, In doing so the book goes beyond normal data documentation - essential though that is - to confront the analytic issues faced by users of the data now distributed by MARPOR. It also provides concrete strategies for tackling these at the research level, with examples from the field of political representation. The problems of uncertainty, error, reliability and validity considered here are generic issues for political analysts in any area of research, so the book has an interest extending beyond the Manifesto estimates themselves - in particular to other textual analyses. In addition the book widens the range of applications introduced in our two previous volumes and discusses the extension of the manifesto project database to cover Latin America.

This unique book contains the only set of statistical estimates of party, government, and electoral preferences in 25 countries over the entire post-war period. These are based on content analyses of electoral and government programs for each election and government of the period, a task which no one else has even attempted. It provides these estimates directly for computer use on the CD ROM provided with it. The printed text provides documentation and suggests uses for data, along with much other background information.

Parties and Democracy studies the actual behaviour of some four hundred governments in twenty post-war democracies, including those of Western Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand. The conclusion that parties do function in accordance with modern democratic theory will serve to put moral justifications of democracy and descriptions of the system on a firmer footing.

First published in 1976, this classic volume of original essays constitutes a unique and comprehensive review of the approaches and assumptions that dominate the field of election studies and voting behavior. Critical reviews of theory and established research are combined with accounts of innovative and original studies of a variety of European countries, as well as in North America. Therefore this volume presents valuable comparative data and methodological insights, including statistical analyses of voting data and critical accounts of major approaches to the representation of voting and party competition. These include party identification (the socio-psychological approach); dimensional analysis (the production of party spaces based on social and political cleavages); and rational choice analysis (the interaction between voters and parties within a policy space). This edition includes a new introduction by Ian Budge and Ivor Crewe.