Suchergebnisse

"This book focuses on the rise of new challenger parties and the magnitude of their impact on political systems and the existing political order in Southern Europe in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Examining Podemos (Spain), SYRIZA (Greece) and M5S (Italy), it highlights the differences and commonalities between them and their voters. The book reveals whether these parties were effectively able to change the status quo represented by mainstream parties and, secondly, whether they created novel organizational structures capable of "bring the people in", i.e. of re-mobilizing dis-enfranchised voters and of re-inventing the concept of participation within the political party. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of party politics, representation, leadership, political elites, public opinion, populism and more broadly to comparative politics, European studies, and contemporary European history"--

"This book focuses on the rise of new challenger parties and the magnitude of their impact on political systems and the existing political order in Southern Europe in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Examining Podemos (Spain), SYRIZA (Greece) and M5S (Italy), it highlights the differences and commonalities between them and their voters. The book reveals whether these parties were effectively able to change the status quo represented by mainstream parties and, secondly, whether they created novel organizational structures capable of "bring the people in", i.e. of re-mobilizing dis-enfranchised voters and of re-inventing the concept of participation within the political party. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of party politics, representation, leadership, political elites, public opinion, populism and more broadly to comparative politics, European studies, and contemporary European history"--

The recent success of new movement parties in Europe brought the attention of party politics scholars to this hybrid party type. There are still many under-analysed theoretical and empirical aspects related to their organization and this article aims to show that despite sharing older movement parties' traits, these 'new' movement parties introduce for the first time a unique combination of plebiscitarian intra-party democracy and party leadership empowerment. The implications of these findings are twofold: first, despite promoting intra-party democracy mainly through new digital tools, the main function of party membership is that of cheerleading; second, the leadership exercises strict control over the organization, thus restricting bottom-up 'voice' from the rank-and-file.

AbstractScholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism.

In the last decades, the cartel party theory has been one of the most discussed topics in the academic literature on political parties. Several publications have dealt with the application of the theory at the systemic level, using a country as a unit of analysis. Less attention has been given thus far to the party level. This analysis is aimed at improving the study of the cartel party theory by focussing on the transformations of three social-democratic parties in Europe: theParti Socialistein France, thePartido Socialista Obrero Españolin Spain, and thePartito Democraticoin Italy. The main findings in this work will not confirmin totothe theoretical assumption of the cartel party, in particular as regards membership and, in part, political convergence. Albeit declining, membership has been resilient in the last two decades. Despite a clear-cut convergence in EU-related issues, political manifestos of mainstream parties have shown a certain degree of polarization. Finally, while the three parties under examination rely almost entirely on public subventions, political parties proved to be capable of reforming the public funding laws, increasing the transparency of donations and reducing the total amount of public subvention.