Book Description

Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. The General Editors are Professor Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin and Kenneth Newton, University of Southampton and Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin . The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. The sister volume to 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.