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"Democracy -- Europe, Southern"
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Democratic quality in Southern Europe : France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain
Fueled by new data from the Varieties of Democracy project, Democratic Quality in Southern Europe takes a close look at the democratic trajectories of France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain over the past fifty years.
Despite similar beginnings, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain have experienced significant variations in the way their democracies have evolved. Covering ground from the protest movements of the late '60s and early '70s to the challenges that resulted from the financial crisis of the Great Recession, editor Tiago Fernandes expertly draws together a collection of essays that look beyond the impact of socioeconomic development in these five countries, exploring innovative and nuanced explanations for their diverging paths.
Democratic Quality in Southern Europe combines new data with classical methodologies to create fresh, convincing hypotheses on the development, quality, and depth of democracy in this critical region.
Contributors: Tiago Fernandes, Rui Branco, João Cancela, Edna Costa, Pedro Diniz de Sousa, Pedro T. Magalhães, Edalina Rodrigues Sanches, José Santana-Pereira, Tiago Tibúrcio
eBook
Democracy and the state in the new Southern Europe
This book is the fourth in a five-volume series examining the cultural, economic, political, and social changes that have transformed Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) in the final three decades of the 20th century. Like the preceding three volumes, it examines the impact of three powerful transformative forces that, in general, have eroded away the “exceptional” status of these countries and moved them toward the mainstream of Western industrialized societies: democratization, socioeconomic modernization, and Europeanization. Four public policy sectors (taxation, environmental protection, social welfare programs, and aggregate levels of social spending) and three institutional arenas of the state itself (the judiciary, public administration, and relationships among the national, subnational, and supranational levels of government) serve as the analytical foci of these studies. In contrast with the rapid, “leapfrogging” processes of political change identified in the first two volumes (especially with regard to democratic consolidation and the emergence of “modern” political parties and patterns of electoral behavior), transformations of the state and public policies in these four countries have entailed considerable time-lags, persisting rigidities in some sectors, and striking divergences in the evolution of state structures. At the same time, there have been substantial cross-national differences and divergences among policy sectors (with taxation, aggregate levels of social spending, and, in Spain, political decentralization evolving rapidly, while other policy domains and state institutions have resisted change). The book concludes that these three broad social forces alone cannot account for these patterns. It concludes that they can only be accounted for by political processes, involving the extent to which institutions or policy subsectors had been closely linked to or autonomous from the former, pre-democratic regime, as well as the resources available to defenders of the status quo.
eBook
Southern European Parliaments in Democracy
Southern European Parliaments in Democracy analyses the development of the parliaments of Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey since the mid-1980s. This book considers the challenges of the transition to democracy and outlines how the Parliaments of Southern Europe have adapted to the pressures of a democratic polity. Its focus is an assessment of the main changes that have taken place since the periods of transition to democracy right up to the present day. Chapters are country specific and consider a variety of indicators, from legislation and scrutiny to the social background of MPs.
This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.
eBook
Varieties of Inclusionary Populism? SYRIZA, Podemos and the Five Star Movement
Over the past years, parties often described as populist, such as SYRIZA in Greece, the Five Star Movement (FSM) in Italy and Podemos in Spain have made significant electoral breakthroughs, unsettling well-established party systems. In the literature, inclusionary populism has primarily been applied to Latin America whereas the three Southern European parties have been examined individually, but not in comparative perspective. The purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis, based on an original electoral manifestos content analysis, aimed at unveiling the ‘inclusionary populism’ features of the ‘new’ political parties that have emerged in Southern Europe. By focusing on the 2012–16 period, the article shows that the inclusionary category can be fruitfully applied also to European political parties; it finds different degrees of inclusionary populism (namely between SYRIZA and Podemos); and it proves that the FSM falls between the two exclusionary vs. inclusionary poles.
Journal Article
Political Representation in Southern Europe and Latin America
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.
It provides a general overview of political representation studies in Southern Europe and Latin America and builds bridges between the two traditions of political representation studies, affording greater understanding of developments in each region and promoting future research collaboration between Southern Europe and Latin America. Finally, the book addresses questions of continuity and change in patterns of political representation after the onset of the two economic crises, specifically examining such issues as changes in citizens' democratic support and trust in political representatives and institutions, in-descriptive representation (in the socio-demographic profile of MPs) and in-substantive representation (in the link between voters and MPs in terms of ideological congruence and/or policy/issue orientations).
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political elites, political representation, European and Latin American politics/studies, and more broadly to comparative politics.
eBook
The Greek Exodus from Egypt
From the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Greeks comprised one of the largest and most influential minority groups in Egyptian society, yet barely two thousand remain there today. This painstakingly researched book explains how Egypt's once-robust Greek population dwindled to virtually nothing, beginning with the abolition of foreigners' privileges in 1937 and culminating in the nationalist revolution of 1952. It reconstructs the delicate sociopolitical circumstances that Greeks had to navigate during this period, providing a multifaceted account of demographic decline that arose from both large structural factors as well as the decisions of countless individuals.
eBook
Easy Come, Easy Go? Economic Performance and Satisfaction with Democracy in Southern Europe in the Last Three Decades
In the literature on political support, much empirical effort has been devoted to the link between economic performance and satisfaction with democracy. Nevertheless, analyses are often inconclusive in their findings. This study tries to renew the interest in the topic by using multilevel models to analyse 108 surveys from the repeated cross-sectional Eurobarometer data between 1985 and 2013, and focuses on southern European countries which share political and economic characteristics. Thus, the article links economic trends to changes in satisfaction with democracy in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, also emphasizing the relevance of transformations in their political systems. The results demonstrate that low economic performance seems to negatively affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in the four countries and across the whole period analysed. This also holds true for different model specifications and when other potential factors such as the format and the performance of the institutional context are controlled for. By providing empirical evidence based on a longitudinal analysis, this article contributes to the wider debate on how economic conditions influence opinions about democracy.
Journal Article
Monitoring Democracy
In recent decades, governments and NGOs--in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world--have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? Monitoring Democracy argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving interaction between domestic and international politics, Judith Kelley refutes prevailing arguments that international efforts cannot curb government behavior and that democratization is entirely a domestic process. Yet, she also shows that democracy promotion efforts are deficient and that outside actors often have no power and sometimes even do harm.
Analyzing original data on over 600 monitoring missions and 1,300 elections, Kelley grounds her investigation in solid historical context as well as studies of long-term developments over several elections in fifteen countries. She pinpoints the weaknesses of international election monitoring and looks at how practitioners and policymakers might help to improve them.
eBook
Membership and members’ participation in new digital parties: Bring back the people?
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the participation of the membership in new digital parties, i.e., Five Stars Movement and Podemos. Following the pioneering example of the Pirates parties, those two parties rely on digital platform to make crucial decisions. While the literature has extensively dealt with several aspects of party organizations, little has been said on membership participation. The aim of this paper is to inquire whether new (digital) participatory tools are able to boost political participation. Firstly, I evaluate the types of membership that these parties allow. Secondly, I analyze when, under which rules and in which fields direct democracy tolls have been used. Thirdly, I evaluate the overall participation of the membership to internal consultations. The (partial) conclusion that I reach is that, albeit presenting different characteristics, the platform implemented by the parties have tried to expand direct democracy in the internal decision-making. However, the low participation rates indicate that direct democracy risks to be an empty vessel if not coupled with a constant political mobilization.
Journal Article