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This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives instructions on how to access the data on your own computer. For comparative purposes, similar estimates of policy and preferences are given for CEE, OECD and EU countries. These estimates update the prize-winning data set covered in Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998 - also published by OUP. A must-buy for all commentators, students and analysts of democracy, in Eastern Europe and the world.

One question at the heart of the analysis of gender and politics is whether women and men act and speak in different ways to significant political effect. In terms of political representation, this issue is particularly important. Arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament, for example, are not about an abstract numerical parity, but rest on a claim about the distinctive voice and experience that women bring to political debate and decisions. For some, the difference turns on the view that women bring a more empathetic and less adversarial style to politics. A number of feminist scholars have suggested that the quality of deliberation is correlated with the presence of women in a group—for Mansbridge (1996, 123), for example, the process of persuasion is related to a consultative and participatory style that seems to characterize women more than men. For others, arguments for increasing the number of women representatives in parliament turn on a difference of values. Such views were particularly widespread in the 1980s, when psychological and social theories of gender differences claimed to have found evidence of parallel but different moral reasoning in women and men (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993). Gilligan (1982, 57), among others, advanced in her seminal work, In a Different Voice, that female politicians are more likely to espouse an “ethic of care” concerned with responsibility and interpersonal relationships, while men are, by contrast, prone to embrace an “ethic of justice.”

While textbooks offer numerous devices for enhancing and testing the data quality of content analysis, all tools must be tailored in line with the contexts of the text and the analytical concepts of research. This is particularly the case in a long-term project such as ours that has continued for three decades to code election programs of all significant parliamentary parties in old and new representative democracies since World-War II for the purpose of measuring policy preferences of political parties. This article starts with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the two basic types of quantitative approaches — human-based and computer-based content analysis. The basic features of our classical human-based approach for estimating parties' policy preferences are outlined by reference to Krippendorf's (2006) typologies of reliability and validity. The conclusions highlight implications of the contexts of manifestos and the concepts applied to them for providing high quality manifesto data across party systems and elections.

[...]of celebritisation, politics has come to focus less on traditional institutional practices than on voice, less on advocacy than on image, and less on message content than on performance. [...]in the US presidential election of 2008 the Republican candidate for the vice-presidency, Sarah Palin, came across as weak because of her inability to provide effective answers to questions from television journalists.

The state of Israel emerged, de facto and de jure, as a result of the United Nations decision to partition the mandatory territory of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. (Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947). The Jews of Palestine supported this resolution. The Arabs rejected it and launched an invasion the day following the withdrawal of the British mandatory power.

Evidence-based answers to such questions can be derived from this meticulous academic study by Sarah Childs and Paul Webb, who investigate the views of party members, voters and parliamentarians and question whether Cameron's Conservative Party has changed significantly in terms of promoting gender equality. Giving priority to dealing with the economic crisis also helped in downgrading the importance of gender-related issues, and policies designed to cut public expenditure and reform of the NHS and welfare systems are seen by many as especially detrimental to women.

Evidence-based answers to such questions can be derived from this meticulous academic study by Sarah Childs and Paul Webb, who investigate the views of party members, voters and parliamentarians and question whether Cameron's Conservative Party has changed significantly in terms of promoting gender equality. Giving priority to dealing with the economic crisis also helped in downgrading the importance of gender-related issues, and policies designed to cut public expenditure and reform of the NHS and welfare systems are seen by many as especially detrimental to women.