Political Entrepreneurs

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries ◽  
Sara B. Hobolt
Keyword(s):  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Government Experience ◽  
The Face ◽  
Dominant Parties ◽  
Political Entrepreneurs ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Party Dominance ◽  
Mainstream Party ◽  
Alternative For Germany

Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. This book explores why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs. Drawing analogies with how firms compete, the book demonstrates that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain. As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, the book shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.

Opposition Growth in Dominant Party Systems: Coalitions in South Africa

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Langfield
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Party System ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Western Cape ◽  
Western Cape Province ◽  
Dominant Party ◽  
Party Strategies ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
Dominant Parties

What is responsible for the decline of democratically dominant parties and the corresponding growth of competitive party systems? This article argues that, despite a ruling party's dominance, opposition forces can gain by winning important subnational offices and then creating a governance record that they can use to win new supporters. It focuses on South Africa as a paradigmatic dominant party system, tracing the increased competitiveness of elections in Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province between 1999 and 2010. These events show how party strategies may evolve, reflecting how party elites can learn from forming coalitions.

The Referendum and Political Change

1975 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Smith
Keyword(s):  
European Community ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Decisions

AS A WAY OF REACHING IMPORTANT POLITICAL DECISIONS, THE referendum is usually regarded as a clumsy and unsatisfactory instrument and quite unimportant as a contribution to political democracy. Yet widespread demands for more participation ‘by the people’ have brought the referendum into new-found favour. Interest has been rekindled too by its application to the issue of membership of the European Community, with the clear possibility of directly comparing the referenda in the four countries involved. This new interest in the referendum comes at a time when many party systems, the traditional supports of a purely parliamentary democracy, appear to be in disarray, and there are signs of increasing volatility within electorates which can foreshadow basic realignments in party systems. Questions now are naturally being raised about the future ordering of democratic politics, and for this reason it seems justifiable to focus an examination of the referendum especially on the problem of political change.

scholarly journals Neopatrimonialism and Party Clientelism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teimuraz Kareli
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Dominant Party ◽  
The Government ◽  
Basic Features ◽  
The Right ◽  
Party Dominance ◽  
Ruling Party

The article deals with the features of formation of the party systems in the post-Soviet space. To understand the specific processes, the attention is focused on the inverse logic of the post-Soviet states, the basic features of which can be expressed by the concept of neopatrimonialism. In this context the functioning features of political parties, their principal tasks and the logic of creating the "power party" are described. The article examines the key criteria for the concept of the dominant party, such as its ability to consistently and steadily win the elections, the significant duration of its stay in power, as well as its personnel Control over the government. In the sociopolitical discourse the "power party" enjoys a privileged ideological position and has more opportunities compared to its competitors to appeal to voters. Along with that the party dominance reveals itself not only in its external manifestation (the stay in power), but also in the substantial one – the ability to exercise an effective political choice. The article analyzes the factors of sustainability of the "power party" systems: the historical merits of the "power party"; the ruling party’s ability to effectively take advantage of the electoral system; its strong relationships with the most affluent social groups and major corporations, as well as with the predominant ethnic or linguistic social groups; a privileged access of the ruling party to media resources. These factors are also effective in the polycentric political systems without any dominant party. However, under the dominant party systems they manifest themselves in a complex way, providing the ruling camp with a multi-layered protection due to a synergy effect. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of clientelism, widely used by the ruling party as a strategy of political mobilization. However, if discrimination arose by clientelism reaches the level that denies clients the right to choose, this is certainly not consistent with the rules of democracy.

scholarly journals ‘Your country needs you’: the ethics of allocating staff to high-risk clinical roles in the management of patients with COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7) ◽  
pp. 436-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dunn ◽  
Mark Sheehan ◽  
Joshua Hordern ◽  
Helen Lynne Turnham ◽  
Dominic Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Health Service Delivery ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Health Providers ◽  
Individual Health ◽  
Staff Allocation ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Ethical Tension

As the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on health service delivery, health providers are modifying care pathways and staffing models in ways that require health professionals to be reallocated to work in critical care settings. Many of the roles that staff are being allocated to in the intensive care unit and emergency department pose additional risks to themselves, and new policies for staff reallocation are causing distress and uncertainty to the professionals concerned. In this paper, we analyse a range of ethical issues associated with changes to staff allocation processes in the face of COVID-19. In line with a dominant view in the medical ethics literature, we claim, first, that no individual health professional has a specific, positive obligation to treat a patient when doing so places that professional at risk of harm, and so there is a clear ethical tension in any reallocation process in this context. Next, we argue that the changing asymmetries of health needs in hospitals means that careful consideration needs to be given to a stepwise process for deallocating staff from their usual duties. We conclude by considering how a justifiable process of reallocating professionals to high-risk clinical roles should be configured once those who are ‘fit for reallocation’ have been identified. We claim that this process needs to attend to three questions that we consider in detail: (1) how the choice to make reallocation decisions is made, (2) what justifiable models for reallocation might look like and (3) what is owed to those who are reallocated.

‘Making space public’ through occupation: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Iveson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Arab Spring ◽  
Single Site ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Spatial Strategy ◽  
Australian Capital ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Arab Spring

Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect. These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for ‘making space public’. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the critical geographical literatures on occupation and public space, through analysis of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – a politically motivated occupation of a patch of land in the Australian capital that is now entering its 45th year. The Embassy activists mobillised occupation in the process of making and sustaining a counterpublic. Counterpublic participants face a distinct set of geographical challenges in making space for both withdrawal and representation in the face of spatial subordination. Occupations like the Embassy seek to resolve these challenges by combining both of these activities in a single site. The Embassy draws our attention to two important sets of issues in relation to the counterpublic geography of occupations. First, it has much to teach about how space is made public through occupation, including dynamics related to the location, duration, reproduction and relations of occupation. Second, the Embassy issues a challenge about whose space is made public through occupation – as an embodied enactment of indigenous sovereignty, the Embassy reminds us that democratic politics in settler colonial nations like Australia is premised on a violent dispossession that has yet to be fully acknowledged or addressed.

Populists in Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 581-598
Author(s):  
Zsolt Enyedi ◽  
Stephen Whitefield
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
Mainstream Party ◽  
Critical Citizens ◽  
Advanced Democracies

Much of the literature on populism, particularly in contemporary advanced democracies, focuses on its disruptive power to shake up mainstream party systems, to criticize the functioning of democratic institutions, and to mobilize critical citizens against elites. This chapter considers how populists construct regimes when they have established themselves in power, taking cases from post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe as examples. We identify specific governmental policies, ideological tenets, institutional designs, and discursive practices that enable populists to stabilize their rule and forge representational linkages with large blocks of the population. The chapter questions, however, whether the success of populists in power in these cases provides an indication of how populists might succeed in advanced democracies or whether it is a result of the peculiar political conditions of post-Communism, the absence of which suggests limiting conditions in other contexts.

Democratic Politics and Political Economy since the 1980s: Transforming the Programmatic Structure of Latin American Party Systems?

2012 ◽  
pp. 209-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Kitschelt ◽  
Kirk A. Hawkins ◽  
Juan Pablo Luna ◽  
Guillermo Rosas ◽  
Elizabeth J. Zechmeister
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
American Party

scholarly journals Gender and Democratic Politics: A Comparative Analysis of Consolidation in Argentina and Chile

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 765-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGINA WAYLEN
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Consolidation ◽  
Transition System ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Presidential Systems

This article highlights a number of themes useful in the gendered analysis of democratic consolidation in Latin America by means of a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile. It starts from the assumption that much of the work on democratisation in Latin America – both orthodox and the literature concentrating on women and transitions – produced up until now, has been too voluntaristic in its approach. It argues that what is needed, particularly in the study of democratic consolidation, is an analysis not only of the impact of women and women's organisations on institutions and structures but also of how these institutions and structures can shape and change gender relations and different women's activities. Any gendered analysis of democratic consolidation must begin by examining the terms of transition which, while they can be subject to some renegotiation later, affect the nature of the subsequent system and the space available to different actors. It is argued that a number of characteristics of the post-transition system are significant: first the impact of more arbitrary populist or presidential systems, second the importance of women's organising both inside and outside the state and party systems and third the existence of an institutionalised party system.

scholarly journals Looking at the Stability and Transformation of the Japanese Postwar Party System

1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (0) ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Jong-Won Lee
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Party Dominance ◽  
Near Future

The Japanese political system of 1946-1996 has often been defined by the continuous rule for four decades of the conservative Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which had held a majority of seats in the Diet between its formation in 1955 until it lost its majority in the Upper House (House of Councilors) in 1989. Under the Japanese political milieus, the LDP has been in a position of semi-permanent governance since 1955 except for a few years in the mid-1990s. The first questionable issue, here, is how the LDP had maintained its dominant position during that period and how one-party dominance system had sustained? How had electoral volatility affected the party system change? Can we expect a dramatic change in Japanese politics in near future? In relation to these questions, how can we apply the theories of comparative parties and party systems to 1946-1996 history of Japanese party politics.

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