Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems

Cleavages, Party Strategy and Party System Change in Europe, East and West

This article analyses the development of competitive party politics in post-communist East Central Europe from a comparative perspective. The central concerns are party system stabilisation and change in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and implications for comparative theory. Starting from Lipset and Rokkan’s ‘cleavage model’, the article assesses the relevance of their key va...

1 Introduction : Party System Change in the Neoliberal Era

A political earthquake struck Venezuela when Hugo Chávez was elected president in December 1998. Chávez, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, launched his political career in 1992 by leading a bloody military revolt against a democratic regime that had long been considered among the most stable in Latin America. The coup attempt failed, landing Chávez in prison, but it catapulted...

Feminism and Abortion in the United States’ Party Politics

Abstract The feminist movement in the United States like other countries has tried to establish equality for women. From the first attempts to gain constitutional right for vote, up to the current radical demands, feminists have struggled to make changes in the U.S. party politics and obtain their rights within the parties. One of the important issues in which women played a key role in party ...

Party Cohesion, Party Factions and Legislative Party Discipline in Italy

Moving beyond a unitary actor assumption that models members of a self-evidently collective entity such as a political party “as if” they all shared a single brain, this paper explores the cohesion and discipline of party legislators in multi-party systems operating under the constitutional rules of parliamentary government. We do this in the context of Italian politics, for which a consistent ...

Ideology and Party System Development