Democratic Politics and Party Competition: (Routledge/ECPR Studies in European Political Science)

This new book introduces innovative research on democracy from the leading Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). It details the key achievements of the project to date, illustrates how its findings may be applied, lays out the future challenges it faces and examines how the field as a whole can advance. It also presents a special assessment of the dimensionality of party competition, presenting ways in which research can be extended and related to broader approaches in Political Science and Theory. Although CMP research is widely used and constitutes the major comparative data set on party positions and ideological location, it is also subject to challenge. The volume therefore provides the reader with a clear sense of the key debates and questions surrounding its work. This volume also honours the life-time achievement of Professor Ian Budge, who has provided distinguished intellectual leadership for the CMP over the last twenty-five years. This is an essential point of reference for all comparative research on the functioning of democracies. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics and of democracy in particular.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. The Comparative Study of Democracy Part 1. Applications 1. Party Government Formation and Policy Preferences: Keman and Budge Revisited 2. A Common Space for Electors and Parties? Comparing Electoral and Party Position on the Left-Right Continuum 3. Parties in Democracy, Democracy in Parties 4. Party Families and European Parliament Party Groups 5. Do Parties Reflect Public Concerns? Part 2. Challenges 6. Does the Median Voter Theorem Wipe Out Political Participation? 7. The Dimensionality of Party Ideologies 8. Occam No, Archimedes Yes 9. Political Space and Its Inhabitants 10. 'Party Defined' Spaces Revisited Part 3. Extensions 11. Why Does Ideology Figure so Little in Vote Models When It Looms so Large in Models of Party Competition? 12. What Do We Want Elections to Do and How Do We Want Them to Do It? 13. Conceptions of Political Tolerance in Great Britain and the United States 14. Preference Shaping Theories 15. Democratic Welfarism and Its Normative Basis

About the Author :
Judith Bara is a Lecturer in Politics, at Queen Mary, University of London and a Research Fellow in Government at the University of Essex, UK. Albert Weale is Professor of Government at the University of Essex, UK. He is also co-Editor of the British Journal of Political Science and Fellow of the British Academy.