Book Review: The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India and the United States

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-565
Author(s):  
Lori Thorlakson
2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 1076-1077
Author(s):  
Radhika Desai

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States, Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 276.Mining electoral data to arrive at theories about the relationship between political party performance and party system determination and electoral and governmental institutions forms the main stream of political science. And one of its most enduring puzzles is the explanation of the patterns and diversities of party systems. With the famous “Duverger's Law” about single-member plurality systems and two-party political systems forming its point of departure, political scientists have attempted to substantiate their discipline's status as a “science” by producing theories about relationships between measurable political variables.


2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHIE JO MARTIN ◽  
DUANE SWANK

This paper investigates the political determinants of corporatist and pluralist employers' associations and reflects on the origins of the varieties of capitalism in the early decades of the 20th century. We hypothesize that proportional, multiparty systems tend to enable employers' associations to develop into social corporatist organizations, whereas nonproportional, two-party systems are conducive to the formation of pluralist associations. Moreover, we suggest that federalism tends to reinforce incentives for pluralist organization. We assess our hypotheses through quantitative analysis of data from 1900 to the 1930s from 16 nations and case studies of the origins of peak employers' associations in Denmark and the United States. Our statistical analysis suggests that proportional, multiparty systems foster, and federalism works against, social corporatist business organization; employers' organization is also greater where the mobilization of labor, traditions of coordination, and economic development are higher. These factors also largely explain pre-World War II patterns of national coordination of capitalism. Case histories of the origins of employers' associations in Denmark and the United States further confirm the causal importance of political factors. Although Danish and American employers had similar interests in creating cooperative national industrial policies, trajectories of associational development were constrained by the structure of party competition, as well as by preindustrial traditions for coordination.


1974 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 682-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Elkins

Most measures of party competition were designed for the United States or other two-party systems. The measure proposed here is intended for multiparty as well as two-party systems. It is a formalization of the notion of uncertainty: election outcomes are competitive to the degree we are uncertain who will win. By ascertaining through survey research the degree of party loyalty over time, one can calculate the chances of alternative outcomes in hypothetical replications of any given election. Since the chance that a losing party might have won is one measure of the importance of that party, this approach to party competition also provides a precise indicator of the number of parties in the system (i.e., whether it is two-party, three party, etc.). The method is applied here to data on Canadian federal elections in 1965 and 1968.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 690-735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred D. Chandler

In Scale and Scope, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., sets out a complex and sustained interpretation of “the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” His work, the culmination of decades of study, spanning three major economies (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) from the 1880s to the 1940s, will undoubtedly be a central point of reference for all business historians for a very long time to come. More than that, it also makes contributions to, and has wide implications for, a great variety of fields of scholarship, research, and debate. It is hard to imagine any single book review that could do justice to the scale and the scope of Chandler's work.


1981 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Mughan

The question of party identification's cross-national validity revolves around the issue of whether or not it can be meaningfully distinguished from immediate voting preference in European national contexts. Comparing this relationship in the American and British party systems, however, this article demonstrates that the two forms of party support are behaviourally similar not in the case of national contexts, but of parties that are linked to the host society's cleavage structure. Moreover, it suggests that their behavioural similarity in the case of this type of party is a function of the ideological distance separating one from the other rather than of the two forms of party support tapping the same dimension of party loyalty. But, whatever the reason for the similarity, the conclusion cannot be avoided that party identification cannot serve the same range of powerful theoretical functions in Europe that it does in the United States because the former's party systems all reflect one or more long-standing, sometimes bitter, social divisions in the electorate.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document