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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

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

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Belgian Exceptionalism
Belgian Exceptionalism

Author: Didier Caluwaerts

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-24

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1000517292

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book takes stock of Belgium’s exceptional and – for some foreign observers –schizophrenic position in the political world and explains its idiosyncrasy to a non-Belgian audience. Offering a broad and comprehensive analysis of Belgian politics, the guiding questions throughout each of the chapters of this book are: Is Belgium a political enigma, and why? Along which axes is Belgium "exceptional" compared to other countries? And what insights does a comparative study of Belgian politics have to offer? The book therefore provides a critical assessment of how Belgian politics "stands out" internationally, both in good and bad ways – including consociationalism, federalism, democratic innovations, Euroscepticism, government formation, gender equality, among others – and which factors can explain Belgium’s exceptional position. Based on cutting-edge research findings, the book will be of wide interest to scholars and students of Belgian politics, European Politics and Comparative politics. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Representation Amidst Candidates: the Balance of Electoral Lists
Representation Amidst Candidates: the Balance of Electoral Lists

Author: Maximilien Cogels

Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 239061017X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This dissertation focuses on the balances and the representativeness of electoral candidate lists in Belgium between 1995 and 2019. While extensive research has been done in recent years concerning candidate selection, wanting to answer the question of who composes the candidate lists and how, this dissertation shifts the focus to the final offer of the political parties by extensively analysing out of who the candidate lists are composed. In this perspective the dissertation provides a comprehensive map of the electoral candidate lists on five major socio-demographic characteristics: besides the usual suspects of gender and ethnicity, residence (or localness), occupation, and age are tackled as well. The dissertation therefore unravels electoral lists and investigates their differences (over space) and evolution (over time). In a second time, we analyse the extent to which political parties take into account descriptive representation, by comparing the balances with those found in the population. Finally, the dissertation investigates the effect of the balances on the electoral performance of the lists.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies
The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies

Author: Robert Rohrschneider

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 731

ISBN-13: 0192558684

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.

Eternal Bandwagon
Eternal Bandwagon

Author: Byron E. Shafer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-02

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 3030517993

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Orthodox reporting and conventional scholarship focuses on the factors that distinguish each presidential contest and then attempts to explain them. This book rather, demonstrates that the politics of presidential nomination has been remarkably stable in the United States since the 1830s and right through to 2020. A common bandwagon dynamic, rolling once through party organizations and now through presidential primaries, permits a simple measure that has predicted nominations well before the decisive threshold was reached, while allowing precise comparisons across the years. So it becomes possible to separate the handful of things that matter for winnowing a large and diverse society into two individual presidential nominees. This funnel of causality moves through the occupational and careers seedbeds of a field of presidential aspirants, squeezing these fields by way of a small set of structural shapers, until party factions and factional struggles—not rules of the game, not candidate characteristics, not nominating strategies, nor all the other ephemera so beloved of commentators and observers—actually choose a given nominee.

How Ireland Voted 2020
How Ireland Voted 2020

Author: Michael Gallagher

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-10

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 3030664058

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is the 9th volume in the established How Ireland Voted series and provides the definitive story of Ireland’s mould-breaking 2020 election. For the first time ever, Sinn Féin won the most votes, the previously dominant parties shrank to a fraction of their former strengths, and the government to emerge was a coalition between previously irreconcilable enemies. For these reasons, the election marks the end of an era in Irish politics. This book analyses the course of the campaign, the parties’ gains and losses, and the impact of issues, especially the role of Brexit. Voting behaviour is explored in depth, with examination of the role of issues and discussion of the role of social cleavages such as class, age and education. The process by which the government was put together over a period of nearly five months is traced through in-depth interviews with participants. And six candidates who contested Election 2020 give first-hand reports of their campaigns.

Party Members and Activists
Party Members and Activists

Author: Emilie van Haute

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1317524322

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Membership of political parties is diverse. Not everyone participates and those who do, do not participate in the same way. This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates what party membership means in advanced industrial democracies. In doing so, it provides a clearer picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties, and what opinions they hold. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, particularly to those interested in representation, participation, political parties and elections.

New Paths for Selecting Political Elites
New Paths for Selecting Political Elites

Author: Giulia Sandri

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-05-15

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1000390136

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides a cross-country study of the consequences of the expansion of intra-party democracy, the trend towards more inclusive methods of selection for party candidates and leaders, and the impact of these on political elites in terms of sociopolitical profile and patterns of careers. It explores the link between political organizations and political elites, by studying the role of parties in parliamentary and political selection and its impact on the political leadership appointed. Putting an emphasis on primary elections, it analyses the party elites that emerge from those selection processes and those democratized organizational settings. It focuses not only on the analysis of the processes through which party elites are selected and the consequences at the level of the party but also at the level of party elites themselves, i.e. what impact party primaries have on the characteristics parties’ candidates and leaders. The book offers a theoretical, comparative, and empirical account of the internal electoral processes of parties and their impact on political recruitment. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political elites, political parties and party systems, electoral politics, democracy, populism, and leadership, and more broadly to comparative politics.