How Political Parties Respond: Interest Aggregation Revisited

How Political Parties Respond focuses specifically on the question of interest aggregation. Do parties today perform that function? If so, how? If not, in what different ways do they seek to show themselves responsive to the electorate? This fascinating book studies these questions with reference to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. A chapter on Russia demonstrates how newly powerful private interest groups and modern techniques of persuasion can work together to prevent effective party response to popular interests in systems where the authoritarian tradition remains strong. Contents: 1. Do Parties Respond to Voters? Challenges to Political Parties and their Consequences Thomas Poguntke 2. Speaking for Whom? From 'Old' to 'New' Labour James E. Cronin 3. From Disaster to Landslide: The Case of the British Labour Party Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley 4. From People's Movements to Electoral Machines? Interest Aggregation and the Social Democratic Parties of Scandinavia Nicholas Aylott 5. From Aggregation to Cartel? The Danish Case Karina Pedersen 6. How Parties in Government Respond: Distributive Policy in Post-Wall Berlin K. Davidson-Schmich 7. Reaggregating Interests? How the Break-Up of the Union for French Democracy has Changed the Response of the French Moderate Right Nicholas Sauger 8. Radicals, Technocrats and Traditionalists: Interest Aggregation in Two Povincial Social Democratic Parties in Canada Brian Tanguay 9. Paying for Party Response: Parties of the Centre-Right in Postwar Italy Jonathan Hopkins 10. Latecomers but 'Early-Adapters': The Adaptation and Response of Spanish Parties to Social Changes Laura Morales and Luis Ramiro 11. Representative Rule or the Rule of Representations: The Case of Russian Political Parties Susanna Pshizova 12. Five Variations On A Theme: Interest Aggregation By Party Today Kay Lawson Author Biography: Kay Lawson is Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University, and General Editor of the International Political Science Review. Her research and publications have focussed on the comparative study of political parties, including Political Parties and Democracy in the United States, The Comparative Study of Political Parties, Political Parties and Linkage (co-edited), When Parties Fail (co-edited), How Political Parties Work (editor), and Cleavages, Parties and Voters (co-edited). She is also the author of The Human Polity, now in its fifth edition. She is the 2003 recipient of the Eldersveld Award (for a lifetime of outstanding scholarly and professional contributions to the study of parties and political organizations). Thomas Poguntke is Professor of Political Science at SPIRE, Keele University, UK and Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. He is author of Parteiorganisation im Wandel: Gesellschaftliche Verankerung und organisatorische Anpassung im Europaischen Vergleich (Westdeutscher Verlag 2000), Alternative Politics: The German Green Party, (Edinburgh University Press 1993) and co-editor of several volumes politics and parties in western democracies. His main research interests are political parties and the comparative analysis of democratic regimes.