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It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in or...

In God at the Grassroots 2016: The Christian Right in American Politics, a distinguished group of political scientists, many of whom have been studying the Christian Right for more than two decades, assess the 2016 elections from the standpoint of religious conservative activism. These elections, more than any that they have analyzed, best tell the story of the resilience of this movement and its enduring importance. The contributors address the evolution of the religious right movement for mo...

This volume brings together for the first time the British Conservative Political Party General Election Manifestos, dating back to 1900, and including the most recent General Election manifesto of 1997. The project provides an indispensible source of data about the Conservative Party's political ideologies and policy positions, as well as charting their changes over time. The volume has a new introduction written by Alistair B. Cooke, who was Deputy Director of the Conservative Research Depar...

In Central and Eastern Europe, radical right actors significantly impact public debates and mainstream policy agenda. But despite this high discursive influence, the electoral fortune of radical right parties in the region is much less stable. It has been suggested that this may be due to the fact that mainstream competitors increasingly co-opt issues which are fundamental for the radical right. However, the extent to which such tactics play a role in radical right electoral success and failure...

As a spokesman for a country, a continent and the developing world, Thabo Mbeki plays a crucial role in world politics, but to many people he is an enigma. Is this simply because Mbeki is a secretive man, or are there complicated political factors at play? In this book, experienced journalist William Gumede pulls together the insights he has gained from years of reporting on the Mbeki presidency to create a sophisticated but easy-to-read account of South Africa's seat of power. He explores the c...

Within southern Africa, there is an observable increase in dominant party systems, in which one political party dominates over a prolonged period of time, within a democratic system with regular elections. This party system has replaced the one-party system that dominated Africa's political landscape after the first wave of liberations in the 1950s and 1960s. This book seeks to understand this trend and its implications for southern Africa's democracies by comparing such systems in southern Afri...

Under the tenure of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the political system in Hungary has moved significantly in an autocratic direction, yet there is a lack of research explaining the historical context, political landscape and drive behind this shift.This book offers a deep historical and theoretical investigation into how this authoritarian, populist regime has evolved. Backlash from globalization in the 21st century, dissatisfaction with the European Union and international fiscal institutions ha...

In Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics Nick Ellison argues that the concept of equality is the cornerstone of the British socialist tradition. He examines the alternative understandings of equality which have divided the labour party since 1930 and traces the origins of the current shift away from concern for social and economic equality to an increasing emphasis on liberty and individual entitlement.Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics is also concerned with contemporary attitudes within...

Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Base...

Federalism in Germany has come to be viewed as the root cause of the country’s current economic and social malaise. The federal political system which contributed enormously to the economic success and political stability of West Germany is now said to be outdated, overburdened and unworkable. German federalism is now widely seen as being synonymous with Reformstau (reform blockage) and Stillstand (inertia). Critics argue that the system urgently needs to change if Germany is to continue to comp...

Critical international theory encompasses several distinct, radical approaches that focus on identity, difference, hegemonic power, and order. As an applied theory, critical international theory draws on critical social theories to shed light on international processes and global transformations. While this approach has led to increasing interest in formulating an empirically relevant critical international theory, it has also revealed the difficulties of applying critical theory to internationa...

This collection of articles on population growth spans 20 years of the author's thinking and research on a wide range of issues. The book opens with a presentation of the early history of demography before Thomas Malthus wrote his essay on the principles of population (1798) that marked the beginnings of modern demography as a science. The author follows up with a chapter on the estimates made at various times in the past hundred years about the maximum number of people who could live on earth....

Tony Blair's government promises the making of a new Britain. A constitutional revolution, welfare to work and lifelong learning have become the lexicon of a political reformation. The labels "left" and "right" have been superseded by the claims of the new and the defeat of the old, modernization versus traditionalism are the faultlines that determine politics today. This text explores the varying options for radical politics that exist on the terrain of the new Labour Britain - options which po...

Recent scholarship has held that Germany's Catholic population, particularly in rural areas, consistently withheld support from the Nazi Party until its takeover of power in 1933. In Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside Oded Heilbronner makes a careful study of an important counterexample, that of the southern part of the state of Baden, a Catholic region where the Nazi party enjoyed massive support from 1930 onwards. The Nazi success in South Baden, Heilbronner finds, cannot be e...