Party Politics in New Democracies
Paul Webb and Stephen White
Abstract
The sister volume to a book called Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, this book offers a systematic and rigorous analysis of parties in some of the world's major new democracies. Drawing on a wealth of expertise and data, the book assesses the popular legitimacy, organizational development and functional performance of political parties in Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe. It demonstrates the generational differences between parties in the old and new democracies, and reveals contrasts among the latter. Parties are shown to be at their most feeble in those rece ... More
The sister volume to a book called Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, this book offers a systematic and rigorous analysis of parties in some of the world's major new democracies. Drawing on a wealth of expertise and data, the book assesses the popular legitimacy, organizational development and functional performance of political parties in Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe. It demonstrates the generational differences between parties in the old and new democracies, and reveals contrasts among the latter. Parties are shown to be at their most feeble in those recently transitional democracies characterized by personalistic, candidate-centred forms of politics, but in other new democracies — especially those with parliamentary systems — parties are more stable and institutionalized, enabling them to facilitate a meaningful degree of popular choice and control. Wherever party politics is weakly institutionalized, political inequality tends to be greater, commitment to pluralism less certain, clientelism and corruption more pronounced, and populist demagoguery a greater temptation. Without party, democracy's hold is more tenuous.
Keywords:
popular legitimacy,
Latin America,
postcommunist Eastern Europe,
old democracies,
new democracies,
party politics,
pluralism,
clientelism,
corruption
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199289653 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199289653.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Paul Webb, editor
Professor of Politics, University of Sussex
Author Webpage
Stephen White, editor
Professor of International Politics, University of Glasgow
Author Webpage
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