Bücher der Reihe Routledge Research on Social and Political Elites

This book offers the first comprehensive, comparative and coherent perspective on parliamentary candidates in contemporary representative democracy.

This book explores the ways in which political parties in contemporary parliamentary democracies, choose their leaders and hold them accountable in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Norway and the United Kingdom.

This book examines the process of selection, shuffling and removal of ministers in national cabinets around the world. Drawing on original data over several decades, it offers a series of case studies of countries from around the world with differing institutional and cultural structures including presidential and semi-presidential systems, parliamentary, unitary and federal systems, some of which have experienced periods under authoritarian regimes. Featuring fourteen case studies on North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, this book complements the earlier volume The Selection of Ministers in Europe (Routledge, 2009).

Membership of political parties is diverse. Not everyone participates and those who do, do not participate in the same way. This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates what party membership means in advanced industrial democracies. In doing so, it provides a clearer picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties, and what opinions they hold. This text will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, particularly to those interested in representation, participation, political parties and elections.

This book provides new insights on political representation. It is guided by three questions: what roles should representatives play? Who is actually or should be represented? How are the representatives (or how should they be) connected with the represented? Containing contributions from the perspectives of political theory and philosophy, as well as quantitative empirical studies, the volume demonstrates the need to adapt these established questions to new political realities.

This collective volume - with contributions from experts on these regions - examines broader questions about the current crises (The Great Recession and The Commodity Crisis) and the associated changes in political representation in both regions.

This book represents the first comprehensive study of how technocracy currently challenges representative democracy and asks how technocratic politics undermines democratic legitimacy and how strong is its challenge to democratic institutions.