Product Description: Politicians tied to a set of policies provide people with actual choices. They attract like-minded activists, campaign in more focused ways, and build an attractive party label. They are also more likely to succeed in public office...read more

Most models of party competition assume that citizens vote for a platform rather than narrowly targeted material benefits. However, there are many countries where politicians win elections by giving money, jobs, and services in direct exchange for votes. This is not just true in the developing world, but also in economically developed countries - such as Japan and Austria - that clearly meet the definition of stable, modern democracies. This book offers explanations for why politicians engage in clientelistic behaviours and why voters respond. Using newly collected data on national and sub-national patterns of patronage and electoral competition, the contributors demonstrate why explanations based on economic modernization or electoral institutions cannot account for international variation in patron-client and programmatic competition. Instead, they show how the interaction of economic development, party competition, governance of the economy, and ethnic heterogeneity may work together to determine the choices of patrons, clients and policies.

Product Description: Post-Communist Party Systems examines democratic party competition in four postcommunist polities in the mid-1990s, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Legacies of precommunist rule turn out to play as much a role in accounting for differences as the institutional differences incorporated in the new democratic rules of the game...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Capitalist democracies have always displayed considerable diversity in their key political and economic institutions, such as the organization of economic interest groups and private enterprises, the public sector and the welfare state, as well as political parties and social movements...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book explains the contrasting strategies of social democratic parties and their electoral fortunes in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structures and political economic institutions, Herbert Kitschelt analyzes a party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organization, and ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices made by social democratic parties and their electoral results...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Drawing on recent research on the internal politics of the Belgian ecology parties, Agalev and Ecolo, this work demonstrates how political careers in contemporary social movements lead to activism in left-libertarian politics and influence political ideology...read more