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For a long time analyses of political parties were framed within
the usual context of democracy and of the historical transformation
of the forms of democratic government. More recently several
authors, among which eminently Peter Mair, progressively began to
question the relationship between the normative definition of
democratic government and the actual operation of parties. These
new concerns are well epitomized by the tension between
'responsiveness' and 'responsibility' that gives the title to this
book. While classic democratic theory sees as desirable that
parties in government (and in opposition, too) are sympathetically
responsive to their supporters first and more generally to public
opinion and, at the same time, responsible toward the internal and
international systemic constraints and compatibilities, these two
roles seem to have become more difficult to reconcile and even
increasingly incompatible. The chapters of this book explore the
tensions between responsiveness and responsibility decomposing the
international sources from the domestic sources and discussing the
options and the possibilities for political parties to continue to
play the role of provider of political stability in rapidly
changing domestic and international environments. This book was
published as a special issue of West European Politics.
For a long time analyses of political parties were framed within
the usual context of democracy and of the historical transformation
of the forms of democratic government. More recently several
authors, among which eminently Peter Mair, progressively began to
question the relationship between the normative definition of
democratic government and the actual operation of parties. These
new concerns are well epitomized by the tension between
'responsiveness' and 'responsibility' that gives the title to this
book. While classic democratic theory sees as desirable that
parties in government (and in opposition, too) are sympathetically
responsive to their supporters first and more generally to public
opinion and, at the same time, responsible toward the internal and
international systemic constraints and compatibilities, these two
roles seem to have become more difficult to reconcile and even
increasingly incompatible. The chapters of this book explore the
tensions between responsiveness and responsibility decomposing the
international sources from the domestic sources and discussing the
options and the possibilities for political parties to continue to
play the role of provider of political stability in rapidly
changing domestic and international environments. This book was
published as a special issue of West European Politics.
EU Federalism and Constitutionalism: The Legacy of Altiero
Spinelli, edited by Andrew Glencross and Alexander H. Trechsel,
represents the first book-length study of the travails of the
implementation of federalism at the European level from the
perspective of Altiero Spinelli's ideas and his political life,
which were both devoted to a federally united Europe. It is also a
timely publication given the protracted struggle to implement a new
EU institutional architecture the 2009 Lisbon Treaty that is
already being tested by the fallout from the global financial
crisis. This fallout has brought into stark relief the tensions
within the EU over the question of enhancing solidarity and federal
unity or remaining a looser association of sovereign states. Hence
by examining the successes and failures of federalism within the EU
system, the book seeks to explain not only how the EU has reached
its current impasse but also how it may fare in the future. To
achieve this objective, the book takes an interdisciplinary
approach that covers all three dimensions of the European project:
historical, legal, and political. In this fashion, Andrew Glencross
and Alexander H. Trechsel's EU Federalism and Constitutionalism:
The Legacy of Altiero Spinelli offers a comprehensive and
up-to-date analysis of the history, evolution, and future of
federal principles and institutions in the European integration
process."
Stefano Bartolini argues that, despite the growth of a large
theoretical literature about institutions and institutionalism over
the last thirty years, the specific nature of political
institutions has been relatively neglected. Political institutions
have been subsumed into the broader problems of the emergence,
persistence, change and functions of all types of institutions. The
author defines political institutions strictly as norms and rules
of 'conferral', to be distinguished from norms/rules of 'conduct'
and of 'recognition'. They are those norms and rules that empower
rulers, set limits to the capacity to ensure behavioural
compliance, and define the proper means for achieving such
compliance. This book draws logical and empirical consequences from
this understanding, to distinguish different types of norms/rules,
and to specify the peculiarities of those norms/rules that are
'political'. The book will appeal to researchers of political
institutions in comparative politics, and in political science and
political sociology more broadly.
The question of whether Western party systems were becoming more
unstable and electorates more volatile had already become central
to the study of modern European by the end of the 1970s. Much of
the literature at the time stressed how Western Europe was
experiencing a phase of party breakdown, dealignment and decay, and
how traditional mass politics was in the process of transformation.
In this first book-length analysis of the subject, Stefano
Bartolini and Peter Mair convincingly demonstrated how this
emphasis on change had been largely misconceived and misplaced.
This was the first systematic and conceptually sophisticated work
to bring together the study of electoral change and cleavage
persistence, and has since become one of the landmark volumes in
the study of electoral politics in Europe. The authors examine
patterns of electoral persistence and change in Western Europe
between 1885 and 1985. They assess both what these patterns
indicate with regard to the persistence of traditional cleavages,
particularly the class cleavage, and how these patterns vary
according to political, institutional and social factors. They
analyse the various patterns of competition which have
characterised elections across the different European countries and
in different historical periods, and how cleavages can persist and
re-emerge even in the face of widespread social change. They
develop a sophisticated model of aggregate electoral change, in
which national electorates are conceived as being torn between the
stability brought about by cultural identities and organisational
structures and the stimuli for change that are provoked by party
competition and institutional change. Identity, Competition and
Electoral Availability was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for
Comparative Social Science Research and is now reprinted for the
first time in paperback.
'Politics' is a noun that points to a field or sphere of human
activity and interaction. 'Political' is an adjective that usually
associates with other names to qualify and specify them. Political
behaviour, political institutions, political participation and
political groups denote special kinds of behaviour, institutions,
participation and groups whose specialty resides in their being
'political'. What does this specification refer to? This is the
question that this book aims to answer. The book unpacks the
'politics' understood as the production and distribution of
'behavioural compliance,' as opposed to the view of politics as a
distribution of values, an aggregation of preferences or a solution
to social dilemmas. Starting from a motivational definition of
elementary political action, the endeavour proceeds to a
differentiation of compliance instigations in different social
fields of interaction, characterised by various levels of
confinement of the actors and of monopolisation of command.
'Politics' is a noun that points to a field or sphere of human
activity and interaction. 'Political' is an adjective that usually
associates with other names to qualify and specify them. Political
behaviour, political institutions, political participation and
political groups denote special kinds of behaviour, institutions,
participation and groups whose specialty resides in their being
'political'. What does this specification refer to? This is the
question that this book aims to answer. The book unpacks the
'politics' understood as the production and distribution of
'behavioural compliance,' as opposed to the view of politics as a
distribution of values, an aggregation of preferences or a solution
to social dilemmas. Starting from a motivational definition of
elementary political action, the endeavour proceeds to a
differentiation of compliance instigations in different social
fields of interaction, characterised by various levels of
confinement of the actors and of monopolisation of command.
This book focuses on the historical configuration of the
territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European
nation state. It presents integration as a process of boundary
transcendence, redefinition, shift, and change that fundamentally
alters the nature of the European states. Its core concern lies in
the relationship between the specific institutional design of the
new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from
its political production, and, finally, the consequences of these
two elements on established and developing national European
political structures. Integration is examined as a new historical
phase in the development of Europe, characterized by a powerful
trend toward legal, economic, and cultural de-differentiation after
the five-century process of differentiation that led to the
European system of nation states.
Considering the EU as the formation of an enlarged territorial
system, this work recovers some of the classic issues of political
modernization theory: Is the EU an attempt at state formation? Is
it an attempt at centre formation without nation building? Is it a
process of centre formation without democratization?
This work also seeks to sharpen the conceptual tools currently
available to deal with processes of territorial enlargement and
unification. It develops a theoretical framework for political
structuring beyond the nation state, capable of linking all aspects
of EU integration (inter-governmentalism, definition of rights, the
"constitutionalization" of treaties, the tensions between the new
territorial hierarchy and the nation states, etc.). The book adopts
a "holistic" approach to integration, in the form of a theoryfrom
which hypotheses can be generated (even if it is not possible to
test all of its components). This theoretical framework has three
principal aims: to overcome a rigid distinction between domestic
politics and international relations; to link actors' orientations,
interests, and motivations with macro outcomes; and to relate
structural profiles with dynamic processes of change.
In an in-depth comparative analysis, Stefano Bartolini studies the
history of socialism and working-class politics in Western Europe.
While examining the social contexts, organizational structures and
political developments of thirteen socialist experiences from the
1880s to the 1980s, he reconstructs the steps through which social
conflict was translated and structured into an opposition, as well
as how it developed its different organizational and ideological
forms, and how it managed more or less successfully to mobilize its
reference groups politically. Bartolini provides a comparative
framework that structures the wealth of material available on the
history of each unit and allows him to assess the relative weight
of the complex explanatory factors.
This book focuses on the historical configuration of the
territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European
nation state. It presents integration as a process of boundary
transcendence, redefinition, shift, and change that fundamentally
alters the nature of the European states. Its core concern lies in
the relationship between the specific institutional design of the
new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from
its political production, and, finally, the consequences of these
two elements on established and developing national European
political structures. Integration is examined as a new historical
phase in the development of Europe, characterized by a powerful
trend toward legal, economic, and cultural de-differentiation after
the five-century process of differentiation that led to the
European system of nation states. Considering the EU as the
formation of an enlarged territorial system, this work recovers
some of the classic issues of political modernization theory: Is
the EU an attempt at state formation? Is it an attempt at centre
formation without nation building? Is it a process of centre
formation without democratization? This work also seeks to sharpen
the conceptual tools currently available to deal with processes of
territorial enlargement and unification. It develops a theoretical
framework for political structuring beyond the nation state,
capable of linking all aspects of EU integration
(inter-governmentalism, definition of rights, the
'constitutionalization' of treaties, the tensions between the new
territorial hierarchy and the nation states, etc.). The book adopts
an 'holistic' approach to integration, in the form of a theory from
which hypotheses can be generated (even if it is not possible to
test all of its components). This theoretical framework has three
principal aims: to overcome a rigid distinction between domestic
politics and international relations; to link actors' orientations,
interests, and motivations with macro outcomes; and to relate
structural profiles with dynamic processes of change.
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