A New European Dataset and the Measurement of Party System Closure

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Fernando Casal Bértoa ◽  
Zsolt Enyedi

The second chapter introduces the dataset of the book, defines its units of measurement, and operationalizes its key concepts. We discuss the method of creating our principal tool of analysis, the composite closure index. We reflect in detail on the question of how experiences accumulated through time can be taken into account when measuring stability. Finally, in a validation exercise, we also investigate whether our closure index could have been used to predict which democracies collapsed around the world between the two World Wars. With this exercise we also show that closure is a better proxy for party system institutionalization than the more traditionally used indicator, the electoral volatility index.

Author(s):  
Andrew Blick

UK Politics gives an introduction to this subject, providing the foundational understanding, critical perspectives, and historical knowledge needed to make sense of politics in the UK today. Part I looks at the way people are governed in the UK. This includes an analysis of the Cabinet and the Prime Minster, parliament, and the UK and human rights. Part 2 looks at how people participate in politics through examining the party system, elections, and voting. It also considers the issue of referendums. The third part is about how society affects UK politics. This part of the text examines communication and public opinion and considers identity, equality, and power. The final part is about the UK relates to the rest of the world. The key concepts here are devolution, local government, the nations and the union, and the outside world.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Schleiter ◽  
Alisa Voznaya

Why do repeated elections often fail to curb governmental corruption, even in full democracies? While much of the comparative literature on corruption focuses on the institutional features of democracies, this article argues that party system institutionalization is an additional and neglected factor in explaining why corruption may persist in the context of democratic elections. Under-institutionalized party systems impede accountability. They compromise the capacity of voters to attribute responsibility and undermine electoral co-ordination to punish incumbents for corruption. These expectations are tested by combining a controlled comparative study of eighty democracies around the world with an examination of the causal process in a case study of Panama. The findings suggest that party system institutionalization powerfully shapes the scope for governmental corruption.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Chiaramonte ◽  
Vincenzo Emanuele

Despite a great flourishing of studies about Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, the issue of party system institutionalization has been widely neglected in Western Europe, where the presence of stable and predictable patterns of interactions among political actors has been generally taken for granted for a long time. Nevertheless, party system institutionalization is not something that can be gained once and for all. This article proposes a theoretical reconceptualization and a new empirical operationalization of party system (de-)institutionalization. Furthermore, it tests the presence of patterns of de-institutionalization in Western Europe from 1945 to (March) 2015 (336 elections in 19 countries) by using an original database of electoral volatility and of its internal components (regeneration and alteration). Data analysis shows that Western Europe is facing great electoral instability and party system regeneration and that many countries have experienced sequences of party system de-institutionalization, especially in the last two decades.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Kirch

Both Pope Francis and Robert Schreiter recognize that the world has been profoundly affected by conflict, globalization, and the breakdown of relationships on multiple levels. They also assert that the Church must address these situations. The ecclesiologies of both Schreiter and Francis offer effective tools for this work. This article will examine several key, shared concepts within their ecclesiologies. Specifically, their understandings of the missionary nature of the Church and their robust understanding of catholicity prove to be key concepts in the Church's response to a world marred by sin.


Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.


Author(s):  
Ekrem Karakoç

This chapter opens by providing empirical evidence that income inequality persists or increases in many new democracies after their transition. Then it gives a brief overview of studies that expect reduced inequality because of democratization and questions their three assumptions regarding median voters, party system stability, and the authoritarian legacy on citizen–party linkage. It offers a revision to the median voter theory, emphasizes high electoral volatility in new democracies, and reexamines the legacy of previous nondemocratic regimes on citizen–party linkage. Having offered its argument in a nutshell, it turns to research methodology and case selection. It offers the rationale behind employing a multimethod approach to test its arguments. It tests its argument through large-N analysis in new and longstanding democracies in Europe as well as two paired case studies: Poland and the Czech Republic in postcommunist Europe and Turkey and Spain in Southern Europe.


Author(s):  
Michael W. Pratt ◽  
M. Kyle Matsuba

Chapter 6 reviews research on the topic of vocational/occupational development in relation to the McAdams and Pals tripartite personality framework of traits, goals, and life stories. Distinctions between types of motivations for the work role (as a job, career, or calling) are particularly highlighted. The authors then turn to research from the Futures Study on work motivations and their links to personality traits, identity, generativity, and the life story, drawing on analyses and quotes from the data set. To illustrate the key concepts from this vocation chapter, the authors end with a case study on Charles Darwin’s pivotal turning point, his round-the-world voyage as naturalist for the HMS Beagle. Darwin was an emerging adult in his 20s at the time, and we highlight the role of this journey as a turning point in his adult vocational development.


Author(s):  
Donald Gilbert-Santamaria

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.


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