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.
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Paul D Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on party and electoral politics, including the OUP books Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (with David Farrell and Ian Holliday) and The Presidentialization of Politics (with Thomas Poguntke), and is co-editor of the journal Party Politics. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK.
Jonathan White is Reader in European politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests lie in the fields of political sociology and political theory, with a focus on contemporary European democracy and the European Union. Prior to joining the LSE, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute in Florence. His publications include articles in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Common Market Studies. He is the author of Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave 2011).
Barry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh.
Alan Angell is University Lecturer in Latin American Politics and Fellow of St Antony's College, University of Oxford.
Sarah Birch specialises in the comparative study of electoral institutions as well as the role of ethical misconduct in politics. She is a Reader in Politics at the University of Essex.
John A Booth is Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas.
Zsolt Enyedi is Professor at the Political Science Department of Central European University. He (co)authored two and (co)edited eight volumes and published numerous articles and book chapters, mainly on party politics and political attitudes. His articles appeared in journals such as European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, Political Psychology, West European Politics, Party Politics, Europe-Asia Studies, Perspectives on Politics, European Review, etc. He has received a number of academic awards such as the Rudolf Wildenmann Prize, 2003, Bibó Prize, 2004, and the Hungarian Academy Award 2020.
Krzysztof Jasiewicz is Professor of Sociology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Petr Kopecký has published extensively in the fields of comparative politics, party politics and democratization. His books include Parliaments in the Czech and Slovak Republics (Ashgate 2001), Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Eastern Europe (co-edited, Routledge 2003), Political Parties and the State in Post-Communist Europe (edited, Routledge 2007). He is a co-editor of the journal East European Politics. He is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Leiden University, Netherlands.
Joy Langston is Research Professor of Political Science in the Division of Political Studies in the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City.
Timothy J Power is University Lecturer in Brazilian Studies and a fellow of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford.
Gábor Tóka is a Professor of Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, where he was an Assistant Professor in 1998. He is interested in the comparative study of voting behaviour and particularly in how and when the democratic process helps citizens to make choices that faithfully reflect their underlying preferences. He directed election studies in six East Central European countries and served on the Planning Committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, as co-principal investigator of the 2004 European Election Study, and as academic adviser for cross-national deliberative polls and the 2010 European Media Systems Survey.
Andrew Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
