Parties and Democracy: Party Structure and Party Performance in Old and New Democracies

This book is a comprehensive examination of the changing significance of party organization in established and emergent democracies. Parties are a key institutional feature of democratic politics, yet their role is contested and changing. The volume assembles a galaxy of the leading writers in the field to survey the changing significance of parties in old and new democracies. The book uniquely extends the range of our understanding of parties beyond established democracies. It extends backwards in time, to survey the "golden age" of parties; it examine issues comparatively, both with respect to the new and the old democracies; and it includes several path-breaking accounts of emergent national party systems, in post-Communist Russia, in the Czech Republic, and in Lithuania. The book is distinctive in focusing on a wide range of aspects of party - on institutional structure, on social base, on performance, and on the connections between all of these.