Recent research on the U.S. House of Representatives largely focuses on the effects of partisanship, but the strikingly less frequent studies of the Senate still tend to treat parties as secondary considerations in a chamber that gives its members far more individual leverage than congressmen have. In response to the recent increase in senatorial partisanship, Why Not Parties? corrects this imbalance with a series of original essays that focus exclusively on the effects of parties in the workings of the upper chamber. Illuminating the growing significance of these effects, the contributors explore three major areas, including the electoral foundations of parties, partisan procedural advantage, and partisan implications for policy. In the process, they investigate such issues as whether party discipline can overcome Senate mechanisms that invest the most power in individuals and small groups; how parties influence the making of legislation and the distribution of pork; and whether voters punish senators for not toeing party lines. The result is a timely corrective to the notion that parties don’t matter in the Senate—which the contributors reveal is far more similar to the lower chamber than conventional wisdom suggests.

Russia poses a major puzzle for theorists of party development. Whereas virtually every classic work takes political parties to be inevitable and essential to democracy, Russia has been dominated by non-partisan politicians ever since communism collapsed. This book mobilizes public opinion surveys, interviews with leading Russian politicians, careful tracking of multiple campaigns, and analysis of national and regional voting patterns to show why Russia stands out. Russia's historically influenced combination of federalism and super-presidentialism, coupled with a post-communist redistribution of resources to regional political machines and oligarchic financial-industrial groups, produced and sustained powerful party-substitutes that have largely squeezed Russia's real parties out, damaging Russia's democratic development.

Not Invited to the Party demonstrates how the dominant political parties--the Democrats and Republicans--have co-opted the system to their advantage. James Bennett examines the history and array of laws, regulations, subsidies and programs that benefit the two major parties and discourage even the possibility of a serious challenge to the Democrat-Republican duopoly. The American Founders, as it has been generally forgotten, distrusted political parties. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution are parties mentioned, much less given legal protection or privilege. This provocative book traces how by the end of the Civil War the Republicans and Democrats had guaranteed their dominance and subsequently influenced a range of policies developed to protect the duopoly. For example, Bennett examines how the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (as amended in 1974 and 1976), which was sold to the public as a nonpartisan act of good government reformism actually reinforced the dominance of the two parties. While focused primarily on the American experience, the book also considers the prevalence of two-party systems around the world (especially in emerging democracies) and the widespread contempt with which they are often viewed. Featuring incisive commentary on the 2008 election, and a foreword by third-party iconoclast, Ralph Nader, the book considers the potential of truly radical reform toward opening the field to vigorous, lively, contentious independent candidacies that might finally offer alienated voters a choice, not an echo.

This book develops an institutionally embedded framework for analyzing voter choice, examining three electoral arenas: parliamentary, presidential, and federal.

This one-volume reference presents the major conceptual approaches to the study of U.S. political parties and the national party system, describing the organization and behavior of U.S. political parties in thematic, narrative chapters that help undergraduate students better understand party origins, historical development, and current operations. Further, it provides researchers with in-depth analysis of important subtopics and connections to other aspects of politics. Key Features: Thematic, narrative chapters, organized into six major parts, provide the context, as well as in-depth analysis of the unique system of party politics in the United States. Top analysts of party politics provide insightful chapters that explore how and why the U.S. parties have changed over time, including major organizational transformations by the parties, behavioral changes among candidates and party activists, and attitudinal changes among their partisans in the electorate. The authors discuss the way the traditional concept of formal party organizations gave way over time to a candidate-centered model, fueled in part by changes in campaign finance, the rise of new communication technologies, and fragmentation of the electorate. This book is an ideal reference for students and researchers who want to develop a deeper understanding of the current challenges faced by citizens of republican government in the United States.

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in normative political theory. Parties have traditionally been studied by political scientists in their organizational features and in relation to the analysis of related topics such as party systems and electoral systems. Little attention, however, was paid until recently to the normative assumptions that underlie partisanship and party politics. Are parties desirable for democratic politics? How should liberal democracies deal with extremist and/or anti-democratic parties? Do religious parties undermine the secular distinction between religion and politics and is that bad for liberal democracies? These are only some of the many questions that political theorists had left unanswered for a long time. The papers in this collection aim to provide a twofold contribution to the normative analysis of partisanship. On the one hand, they aim to offer a first much needed ‘state of the art’ of the existing research in this area. Many of the contributors have already done extensive research on partisanship and their pieces partly reflect their research expertise and individual approaches to this topic. On the other hand, all pieces move beyond the authors’ existing work and represent significant additions to the normative literature on partisanship, thus setting the standards for future research in this area. This book was published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Political conflicts are not simply manufactured from thin air, Russell Muirhead argues. They originate in authentic disagreements over what constitutes the common welfare. The remedy is not for parties to just get along but to bring a skeptical sensibility to their own convictions and learn to disagree as partisans and govern through compromise.

Ireland has enjoyed continuous democratic government for almost a century, an unusual experience among countries that gained their independence in the 20th century. But the way this works in practice has changed dramatically over time. Ireland's colonial past had an enduring influence over political life for much of the time since independence, enabling stable institutions of democratic accountability, while also shaping a dismal record of economic under-development and persistent emigration. More recently, membership of the EU has brought about far-reaching transformation across almost all aspects of Irish life. But if anything, the paradoxes have only intensified. Now one of the most open economies in the world, Ireland has experienced both rapid growth and one of the most severe crashes in the wake of the Great Recession. On some measures Ireland is among the most affluent countries in the world, yet this is not the lived experience for many of its citizens. Ireland is an unequivocally modern state, yet public life continues to be marked by formative ideas and values in which tradition and modernity are held in often uneasy embrace. It is a small state that has ambitions to leverage its distinctive place in the Atlantic and European worlds to carry more weight on the world stage. Ireland continues to be deeply connected to Britain through ties of culture and trade, now matters of deep concern in the context of Brexit. And the old fault-lines between North and South, between Ireland and Britain, which had been at the core of one of Europe's longest and bloodiest civil conflicts, risk being reopened by Britain's new hard-edged approach to national and European identities. These key issues are teased out in the 41 chapters of this book, making this the most comprehensive volume on Irish politics to date.

Multi-Party and Multi-Contract Arbitration in the Construction Industry provides the first detailed review of multi-party arbitration in the international construction sector. Highly practical in approach, the detailed interpretation and assessment of the arbitration of multi-party disputes will facilitate understanding and decision making by arbitrators, clients and construction contractors.