Parliamentary Candidates Between Voters and Parties
Parliamentary Candidates Between Voters and Parties

Author: Lieven De Winter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1000208184

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This book offers the first comprehensive, comparative and coherent perspective on parliamentary candidates in contemporary representative democracy. Based on the unique database of the ‘Comparative Candidate Survey' project which interrogated parliamentary candidates in more than 30 countries, it fills a significant lacuna by focusing on the thousands of ordinary candidates that participate in national elections. It examines who the candidates are in terms of their socio-demographic background and political career patterns, how they were selected by their parties, what their policy preference are and whether these are congruent to those held by their voters, who they seek to represent and how they intend to do so once elected, and what their visions are on representative democracy and party government. Last but not least, it investigates how they go about reaching out to their potential voters during the election campaign. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political parties and party politics, political elites, political communication, political participation, elections, theories of democracy and representation, legislative studies, voting behaviour and more broadly to European politics, as well as to political and policy professionals throughout Europe.

Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates
Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates

Author: Diego Garzia

Publisher: ECPR Press

Published: 2014-06-06

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1907301739

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Voting Advice Applications – VAAs – have become a widespread online feature of electoral campaigns in Europe, attracting growing interest from social and political scientists. But until now, there has been no systematic and reliable comparative assessment of these tools. Previously published research on VAAs has resulted almost exclusively in national case studies. This lack of an integrated framework for analysis has made research on VAAs unable to serve the scientific goal of systematic knowledge accumulation. Against this background, Matching Voters With Parties and Candidates aims first at a comprehensive overview of the VAA phenomenon in a truly comparative perspective. Featuring the biggest number of European experts on the topic ever assembled, the book answers a number of open questions and addresses debates in VAA research. It also aims to bridge the gap between VAA research and related fields of political science.

Political Recruitment
Political Recruitment

Author: Pippa Norris

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780521465588

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Asking why some politicians succeed in moving into the highest offices of state while others fail, this text examines the relative lack of women, black and working class Members of Parliament, and whether this evident social bias matters for political representation.

Representing the People
Representing the People

Author: Kris Deschouwer

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0191507482

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Modern democracy is organized as a representative democracy in which those representing the people are elected to office. Political parties play a crucial role in this. They select the candidates, form or oppose governments, and organize the work of the representatives in parliament. This model of democracy is however being criticized. Parties are hardly trusted and voters have become volatile. How, then, do elected representatives of the people see and fulfil their role? To study this a survey was organized among the members of statewide and sub-state parliaments in fifteen countries. Members of seventy-three parliamentary assemblies were asked how they perceive their representative role, what they do to keep in touch with voters, how they behave and vote in parliament and how they will try to get re-elected. One of the ways in which candidates and elected members of parliament might react to the changing conditions in which they have to represent the people is by stressing more personal characteristics as opposed to the party label and party ideology. Representation might then become more a matter of personal choice. The results of the survey presented in this book do however confirm quite strongly that representation is very much shaped by the political institutions in which it is performed. Representation differs between countries, between different electoral systems, between statewide and regional parliaments, and depends strongly on the party to which a member of parliament belongs. Representation depends not as much on who the representatives are, as on where they are.

Non-party Actors in Electoral Politics
Non-party Actors in Electoral Politics

Author: David M. Farrell

Publisher: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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The contemporary electoral process is, in many ways, far more complex than it used to be. This book focuses on the growing involvement of non-party actors in the process of selecting candidates, as well as involvement during the campaign itself. These actors - interest groups, individual citizens, even certain political institutions - operate in the campaign environment independently of the parties and their candidates. They are not seeking to attain public office, nevertheless they interfere in the electoral process in growing numbers and with increasing intensity. For the most part, they seek to influence electoral outcomes to their advantage, and yet on occasions for less selfish reasons such as increasing the quality of the electoral process itself. Encompassing a broad range of countries - including several old democracies (the US, Germany, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Israel, and others) and one new democracy (Romania) - and combining extensive surveys with detailed case studies of recent elections, the chapters in this volume take stock of this new feature in the contemporary electoral process, along with its origins, forms, and consequences.

Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective
Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective

Author: European Consortium for Political Research

Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited

Published: 1988-02

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13:

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This book examines candidate selection in nine liberal democracies -- Belgium, Britain, France, West Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Norway. It describes the methods by which parties select their candidates; analyses the factors which influence the form of selection used; and considers the consequences of candidate selection. The book concludes with an overall assessment of the role of candidate selection in the political process. It questions whether proportional representation necessarily entails centralized candidate selection; whether parties of the Left tend to be more centralized than parties of the Right; and whether different types of candidate selection have distinct consequences for the behaviour of deputies.

Candidates, Parties and Voters in the Belgian Partitocracy
Candidates, Parties and Voters in the Belgian Partitocracy

Author: Audrey Vandeleene

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-11-03

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 3319964607

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This book focuses on the triadic relationship between electoral candidates and the two other poles of the delegation and accountability triangle—political parties and voters. The chapters rely mostly on the Belgian Candidate Survey (CCS project), gathering about 2000 candidates belonging to 15 parties represented in Parliament and running for the 2014 federal and regional elections, and the authors’ conclusions serve at answering broad political science questions linked with elite recruitment, party and candidate electoral strategies, personalisation, party cohesion, and descriptive and substantive representation. Its multilevel semi-open electoral system, atypical federal structure, extreme party system fragmentation and volatility make Belgium an exceptionally rich but complex case that offers findings highly relevant to research on candidates in other democracies.

Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective
Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective

Author: Giulia Sandri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1317083563

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Primary elections for choosing party leaders and candidates are now becoming commonplace in Europe, Asia and America but questions as to how much they hinder a party’s organizational strength and cohesion or affect electoral performance have largely been ignored outside of the USA. Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective gives a much-needed conceptualization to this topic, describing the function and nature of primary elections and providing a comparative analytical framework to the impact of primaries on the internal and external functioning of political parties. Elaborating on the analytical tools developed to study the US experience this framework engages with primary elections in Europe and Asia offering a theoretical, comparative and empirical account of the emergence of party primaries and an invaluable guide to internal electoral processes and their impact.

Comparative European Party Systems
Comparative European Party Systems

Author: Alan Siaroff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1135580243

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This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the party systems of the whole continent of Europe. This work also includes case studies of the Baltic States and Balkan democracies and goes as far east as Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey.

The Uneasy Relationships Between Parliamentary Members and Leaders
The Uneasy Relationships Between Parliamentary Members and Leaders

Author: Reuven Y. Hazan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 113526838X

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The bases of uneasy member-leadership relations, their manifestation and sometimes resolution, and the consequences of member-leadership tension to effective parliamentary performace and policy-making are considered in studies ranging from Germany to the US and New Zealand and globally.