scholarly journals What’s the Party Like? The Status of the Political Party in Anti-Defection Jurisdictions

Author(s):  
Udit Bhatia
2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 538-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Semenova

This article focuses on the patterns of parliamentary representation and careers in post-communist Ukraine. The data includes individual information on 1768 members (with substitutes) of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, from the parliamentary elections in 1990 through to 2007. Low chances for the social upward mobility of sociodemographic groups such as women and poorly educated people were identified, as well as the high impact of social status on inclusion in the political ruling strata, as exemplified by business elites. Furthermore, MPs with an entrepreneurial background have a greater chance of staying in parliament for three or more legislative terms. The chances of remaining in the Verkhovna Rada are also greater for former Supreme Council parliamentarians, while a high-ranking nomenklatura position has no significant effect on the status of an incumbent. Experience in a political party is crucial for a career in parliament. Parliamentarians with leading party experience prior to their recruitment are likely to obtain an incumbent status, while MPs who substitute their elected colleagues have lower chances of becoming long-standing incumbents.


1970 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Azza Charara Baydoun

Women today are considered to be outside the political and administrative power structures and their participation in the decision-making process is non-existent. As far as their participation in the political life is concerned they are still on the margins. The existence of patriarchal society in Lebanon as well as the absence of governmental policies and procedures that aim at helping women and enhancing their political participation has made it very difficult for women to be accepted as leaders and to be granted votes in elections (UNIFEM, 2002).This above quote is taken from a report that was prepared to assess the progress made regarding the status of Lebanese women both on the social and governmental levels in light of the Beijing Platform for Action – the name given to the provisions of the Fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. The above quote describes the slow progress achieved by Lebanese women in view of the ambitious goal that requires that the proportion of women occupying administrative or political positions in Lebanon should reach 30 percent of thetotal by the year 2005!


2021 ◽  
pp. 13-41
Author(s):  
Ella Volodymyrivna Bystrytska

Abstract: A series of imperial decrees of the 1820s ordering the establishment of a Greco-Uniate Theological Collegium and appropriate consistories contributed to the spread of the autocratic synodal system of government and the establishment of control over Greek Uniate church institutions in the annexed territories of Right-Bank Ukraine. As a result, the Greco-Uniate Church was put on hold in favor of the government's favorable grounds for the rapid localization of its activities. Basilian accusations of supporting the Polish November Uprising of 1830-1831 made it possible to liquidate the OSBM and most monasteries. The transfer of the Pochaiv Monastery to the ownership of the Orthodox clergy in 1831 was a milestone in the liquidation of the Greco-Uniate Church and the establishment of a Russian-style Orthodox mono-confessionalism. On the basis of archival documents, the political motivation of the emperor's decree to confiscate the Pochayiv Monastery from the Basilians with all its property and capital was confirmed. The transfer to the category of monasteries of the 1st class and the granting of the status of a lavra indicated its special role in strengthening the position of the autocracy in the western region of the Russian Empire. The orders of the Holy Synod outline the key tasks of ensuring the viability of the Lavra as an Orthodox religious center: the introduction of continuous worship, strengthening the personal composition of the population, delimitation of spiritual responsibilities, clarifying the affiliation of the printing house. However, maintaining the rhythm of worship and financial and economic activities established by the Basilians proved to be a difficult task, the solution of which required ten years of hard work. In order to make quick changes in the monastery, decisions were made by the emperor and senior government officials, and government agencies were involved at the local level, which required the coordination of actions of all parties to the process.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.


Author(s):  
Benjamin von dem Berge ◽  
Thomas Poguntke

This chapter introduces a new, two-dimensional way of measuring intra-party democracy (IPD). It is argued that assembly-based IPD and plebiscitary IPD are two theoretically different modes of intra-party decision-making. Assembly-based IPD means that discussion and decision over a certain topic takes place at the same time. Plebiscitary IPD disconnects the act of voting from the discussion over the alternatives that are put to a vote. In addition, some parties have opened up plebiscitary decision-making to non-members which is captured by the concept of open plebiscitary IPD. Based on the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) dataset, indices are developed for the three variants of IPD. The empirical analyses here show that assembly-based and plebiscitary IPD are combined by political parties in different ways while open party plebiscites are currently a rare exception.


Author(s):  
Annika Hennl ◽  
Simon Tobias Franzmann

The formulation of policies constitutes a core business of political parties in modern democracies. Using the novel data of the Political Party Database (PPDB) Project and the data of the Manifesto Project (MARPOR), the authors of this chapter aim at a systematic test of the causal link between the intra-party decision mode on the electoral manifestos and the extent of programmatic change. What are the effects of the politics of manifesto formulation on the degree of policy change? Theoretically, the authors distinguish the drafting process from the final enactment of the manifesto. Empirically, they show that a higher autonomy of the party elite in formulating the manifesto leads to a higher degree of programmatic change. If party members constrain party elite’s autonomy, they tend to veto major changes.


Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Schupmann

Chapter 2 reinterprets Schmitt’s concept of the political. Schmitt argued that Weimar developments, especially the rise of mass movements politically opposed to the state and constitution, demonstrated that the state did not have any sort of monopoly over the political, contradicting the arguments made by predominant Weimar state theorists, such as Jellinek and Meinecke. Not only was the political independent of the state, Schmitt argued, but it could even be turned against it. Schmitt believed that his contemporaries’ failure to recognize the nature of the political prevented them from adequately responding to the politicization of society, inadvertently risking civil war. This chapter reanalyzes Schmitt’s political from this perspective. Without ignoring enmity, it argues that Schmitt also defines the political in terms of friendship and, importantly, “status par excellence” (the status that relativizes other statuses). It also examines the relationship between the political and Schmitt’s concept of representation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Benjamin Moffitt

Abstract How does a political party become ‘mainstream’? And what makes some parties receive arguably the opposite designation – ‘pariah party’? This conceptual article examines the processes by which parties’ mainstream or pariah status must be constructed, negotiated and policed, not only by political scientists in the pursuit of case selection, but by several actors actively involved in the political process, including media actors and political parties themselves. It explains how these actors contribute to these processes of ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pariahing’, considers their motivations and provides illustrative examples of how such processes take place. As such, the article moves beyond the literature on the ways in which mainstream parties seek to deal with or respond to threats from a variety of pariah parties, instead paying attention to how those parties have been constructed as pariahs in the first place, and how these processes simultaneously contribute to the maintenance of mainstream party identities.


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