1,720,997 research outputs found
Party adaptation and change and the crisis of democracy
No full textThis article is the introduction to a special issue of articles written in honour of Peter Mair. The general theme of the issue is party adaptation and change, which is traced here through an analysis of contributions by Peter Mair as an individual author or with co-authors. The result is an assessment of the current state of the art of what can be cumulatively considered Peter Mair's theory of party adaptation and of the debate it has generated up to and including the contributions included in the special issue itself
The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics Responsive and Responsible?
No full textFor a long time analyses of political parties were framed within the usual context of democracy and of the historical transformation of the forms of democratic government. More recently several authors, among which eminently Peter Mair, progressively began to question the relationship between the normative definition of democratic government and the actual operation of parties. These new concerns are well epitomized by the tension between ‘responsiveness’ and ‘responsibility’ that gives the title to this book.
While classic democratic theory sees as desirable that parties in government (and in opposition, too) are sympathetically responsive to their supporters first and more generally to public opinion and, at the same time, responsible toward the internal and international systemic constraints and compatibilities, these two roles seem to have become more difficult to reconcile and even increasingly incompatible.
The chapters of this book explore the tensions between responsiveness and responsibility decomposing the international sources from the domestic sources and discussing the options and the possibilities for political parties to continue to play the role of provider of political stability in rapidly changing domestic and international environments
Themed issue: Party adaptation and change and the crisis of democracy: Essays in honour of Peter Mair
No full textIngrid van Biezen and Petr Kopeck,
"The cartel party and the state: Party-state linkages in European democracies," 170-182.
Richard S Katz,
"No man can serve two masters: Party politicians, party members, citizens and principal agent models of democracy," 183-193.
Zsolt Enyedi,
"The discreet charm of political parties," 194-204.
Ingrid van Biezen and Thomas Poguntke,
"The decline of membership-based politics," 205-216.
Cas Mudde,
"Fighting the system? Populist radical right parties and party system change," 217-226.
R Michael Alvarez, Ines Levin, Peter Mair, and Alexander Trechsel,
"Party preferences in the digital age: The impact of voting advice applications," 227-236
Responsive and Responsible? The role of Parties in Twenty_First Century politics
No full textThis special issue focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair's intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of pictures' or frames' of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair's work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension
Party placement in supranational elections: An introduction to the euandi 2014 dataset
No full textThroughout the years, political scientists have devised a multitude of techniques to position political parties on various ideological and policy/issue dimensions. So far, however, none of these techniques was able to evolve into a ‘‘gold standard’’ in party positioning. Against this background, one could recently witness the appearance of a new methodology for party positioning tightly connected to the spread of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), i.e. an iterative method that aims at improving existing techniques using a combination of party self-placement and expert judgement. Such a method, as pioneered by the Dutch Kieskompas, was first systematically employed on a large cross-national scale by the EU Prof iler VAA in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. This article introduces the party placement datasets generated by euandi (reads: EU and I), a transnational VAA for the 2014 EP elections. The scientific relevance of the euandi endeavour lies primarily in its choice to stick to the iterative method of party positioning employed by the EU Prof iler in 2009 as well as in the choice to keep as many as 17 policy statements in the 2014 questionnaire in order to allow for cross-national, longitudinal research on party competition in Europe across a five-year period. This article provides a brief review of traditional methods of party positioning and contrasts them to the iterative method employed by the euandi team. It then introduces the specifics of the project, facts and figures of the data collection procedure, and the details of the resulting dataset encompassing 242 parties from the whole EU28
Taking 'Constitutionalism' and 'Legitimacy' Seriously
No full text"The recent debate surrounding the ‘Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe’ and the following ‘Lisbon Treaty’ has been framed around the question‘constitution Yes or No’ and the language of constitutional and legitimacy theory. This paper argues that we should not discuss whether the EU has a ‘formal’ constitution or not, but rather whether the EU treaties embody the principles of ‘constitutionalism’ as developed by the European enlightenment tradition. These principles include ‘limited government’, ‘bill of rights and judicial review’, ‘checks and balances and separation of powers’, and, last but certainly not least, ‘the normative construction of political responsibility’. Judged by these standards, the EU treaties, independently of whether we call them, collectively, a ‘constitution’ or not, are definitely defective on ‘constitutionalist’ grounds because they very poorly substantiate these fundamental principles
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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