Democracy in the Administrative State, The Balance of Power in Society and other essays, The Democratic Experience: Past and Prospects, Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems and Political Parties: Contemporary Trends and Ideas

1970 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-558
Author(s):  
J. Frankel
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Administrative State ◽  
Democratic Experience

Political parties and the policy process

2021 ◽  
pp. 187-202
Author(s):  
Maura Adshead ◽  
Diarmuid Scully
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
New Politics ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Clear Majority

This chapter examines the role of political parties in the policy process. The chapter employs a model of the policy process stages to examine how Irish political parties operate in each stage. This constitutes an exploration of the extent to which so-called ‘new politics’ might have impacted on recent political party roles and performance. However, ‘new politics’, governments without a clear majority seeking consensual support for their policies in the Dáil is nothing new, with no single party majority Government since 1977. Programmatic Government has been normalised and consensus-seeking has become the modus operandi for parties. What is new is that long established parties are now joined by an increasing number of smaller parties in the Dáil, raising the potential to shift the balance of power away from the larger parties, with consequences for the style of, and capacity for, policy analysis. However, the chapter shows that this tendency has been less marked than might have been expected.

Party Systems: Types, Dimensions, and Explanations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsolt Enyedi ◽  
Fernando Casal Bértoa
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Informal Institution ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
The Stability

The study of political parties and party systems is intimately linked to the development of modern political science. The configuration of party competition varies across time and across polities. In order to capture this variance, one needs to go beyond the analysis of individual parties and to focus on their numbers (i.e. fragmentation), their interactions (i.e. closure), the prevailing ideological patterns (i.e. polarization), and the stability of the balance of power (i.e. volatility) in all spheres of competition, including the electoral, parliamentary, and governmental arenas. Together, these factors constitute the core informal institution of modern politics: a party system. The relevant scholarship relates the stability of party systems to the degree of the institutionalization of individual parties, to various institutional factors such as electoral systems, to sociologically anchored structures such as cleavages, to economic characteristics of the polity (primarily growth), to historical legacies (for example, the type of dictatorship that preceded competitive politics) and to the length of democratic experience and to the characteristics of the time when democracy was established. The predictability of party relations has been found to influence both the stability of governments and the quality of democracy. However, still a lot is to be learned about party systems in Africa or Asia, the pre-WWII era or in regional and/or local contexts. Similarly, more research is needed regarding the role of colonialism or how party system stability affects policy-making. As far as temporal change is concerned, we are witnessing a trend towards the destabilization of party systems, but the different indicators show different dynamics. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that party systems are complex, multifaceted phenomena.

Juridische mechanismen van conflictbeheersing in België : het onderwijsprobleem

Res Publica ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-614
Author(s):  
Filip Reyntjens
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
World War ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Zero Sum ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
First World

Political and sociological research indicates that the use of consociational techniques has been a major means of ensuring peace and stability in a divided society like Belgium. This paper attempts to cast a first look at another component: what are the legal mechanisms of confiictmanagement in Belgium ? This question is studied on the basis of the case of the school-confiict, which is one aspect of the ideological dividing line ; this was indeed the first to be institutionalised in Belgium. The drafting of the 1831 Constitution was the first great exercise in consensus-seeking and the same approach prevailed over much of the 19th century. It was interrupted, however, during the first «School War» which was waged from 1879 to 1884. After the First World War a number of issues in the educational dispute were settled by way of package-deals, which were an attempt to replace zero-sum games by more-or-less choices. However a second School War erupted from 1950 to 1958. After the 1958 elections the balance of power was such that compromise showed necessary again : this situation led to the «School Pact» which tried to institutionalise consociational solution-seeking in this field. The Pact system was later applied in numerous other fields where mere majoritarian decision-making was discarded.White in the School issue these solutions were not as yet legalised, in later agreements they were.The paper argues that the main aim of these approaches is to avoid adjudication on these issues by third confiict-solvers, such as courts and tribunals. Instead allocation is arranged between the participants to the deal ; these partners are the political parties who claim to represent the whole range of public opinion. In this way «soft law» is created : this development represents a creeping undermining of the Rule of Law.

A Mobile Phone in One Hand and Erskine May in the Other: The European Research Group’s Parliamentary Revolution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
C R G Murray ◽  
Megan A Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
European Convention ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Research ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The Commons ◽  
State Of Affairs

Abstract It has become axiomatic that backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) at Westminster have limited the capacity for independent action under the burdens of constituency business and whipped votes. Even the limited avenues available for such MPs to shine, such as select committees, are often illusory because parliamentarians have little time to prepare the materials or brief themselves on any but the highest profile witnesses. The political parties have benefitted from this state of affairs; docile MPs make for reliable votes. The rise of the European Research Group (ERG) as a parliamentary force disrupts this narrative. Galvanised by single-issue opposition to the UK’s involvement in ‘Europe’, encompassing both the European Union (EU) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the Group successfully exploited the balance of power in the Commons during the 2017–2019 Parliamentary Session. This article analyses the methods by which the Group’s members magnified their influence over Brexit debates.

scholarly journals A Wall Between the "Public" and the "Private": A Comment on Highwood Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v Wall

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mannu Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Administrative State ◽  
Jehovah’S Witnesses ◽  
Jehovah's Witnesses ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
State Actors

This case comment examines the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Highwood Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Judicial Committee) v Wall. The court ruled that a church’s decision to excommunicate a member could not be judicially reviewed. Rather, judicial review is reserved for decisions by state actors. Wall narrows the scope of judicial review such that many quasi-public actors—such as sports administrators and political parties—are no longer subject to judicial review. The author argues that Wall’s prima facie simplification of the law of judicial review masks deeper conceptual and practical tensions. Specifically, by immunizing quasi-public actors—who are integral to the administrative state—from judicial review, Wall raises questions of accountability. Moreover, the spread of Charter values among such actors is potentially thwarted by this decision. Finally, what is more problematic is that in arriving at its approach to judicial review in Wall, the Supreme Court misinterpreted a helpful body of cases on the public–private distinction and further complicated the question of when judicial review is available to litigants.

8. Governments and bureaucracies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang C. Müller
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Divided Government ◽  
Political Capacity ◽  
Minority Government ◽  
New Public ◽  
Internal Balance

This chapter examines the decision-making modes of governments and their capacities to govern, with particular emphasis on bureaucracies that support governments in their tasks of ruling and administrating the country. It first presents the relevant definitions before discussing different modes of government that reflect the internal balance of power: presidential government, cabinet government, prime ministerial government, and ministerial government. It then considers the autonomy of government, especially from political parties and the permanent bureaucracy, along with the political capacity of governments, the relevance of unified vs divided government, majority vs minority government, and single-party vs coalition government. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the bureaucratic capacities of government, focusing on issues such as classic bureaucracy, the politicization of bureaucracies, and New Public Management systems.

Three Worlds of Representation: A Linkage-Based Typology of Parties in Western and Eastern Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Wineroither ◽  
Gilg U. H. Seeber
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The West ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Unique Data ◽  
Policy Representation ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Industrial Societies

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS Have Eastern European democracies developed patterns of accountability similar to those existent in their established counterparts? While most accounts of convergence are confined to the world of programmatic reasoning and policy representation, we use a unique data set to cover the wealth of instrumental and emotional modes of linkage building. We apply advanced techniques of model-based cluster analysis to establish a linkage-based typology of political parties. In the East, the contrast of programmatic and clientelistic parties is most essential in the absence of strong regional subdivisions. In the West, the structure of linkage building is characterized by an all-encompassing divide that separates mainstream and challenger parties. Parties in Southern Europe form a distinct Mediterranean type of “machine politics.” The results for affluent post-industrial societies both support and contradict premises of the cartel party hypothesis. For third-wave democracies in the East, our results suggest the persistence of legacies of pre-communist and communist rule against the weight of cumulative democratic experience. In sum, patterns of accountability remained markedly different in the two regions on the eve of the economic crisis in 2008–2009.

Economic Development, Democratic Experience, and Political Parties’ Linkage Strategies

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (11) ◽  
pp. 1453-1484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Kitschelt ◽  
Daniel M. Kselman
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Democratic Accountability ◽  
Linkage Mechanism ◽  
Level Of Economic Development ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship among a country’s democratic experience, its level of economic development, and the prevalence of clientelistic and programmatic modes of democratic accountability. In contrast to the commonly accepted wisdom that clientelistic politics will decrease monotonically as a country’s economy develops and its democracy consolidates, the authors argue theoretically and demonstrate empirically that clientelism tends in fact to increase as a country moves from low to intermediate levels of democracy and development. They also uncover preliminary evidence that a history of regime instability may have independent consequences on the prevalence of one or the other linkage mechanism. Finally, the results suggest that a country’s level of economic development and exposure to the international economy are more consistent predictors of programmatic effort and coherence than are measures of a country’s regime type.

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