The Politics of the New Europe: Atlantic to Urals by Ian Budge & Kenneth Newton

Author:Ian Budge & Kenneth Newton [Budge, Ian & Newton, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9781317892397
Google: fKmsAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 20668736
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Notes: The parties mentioned in Table 9.2 are the ones which gained legislative seats in the 1990s, i.e. which exist now.

In general the English names for parties are given, but where parties are commonly referred to in English by their native initials or name these are used.

Electoral alliances such as the Nordic ‘bourgeois coalitions’, the right and left in France, ‘Olive Tree’ and ‘Polof Liberty’ in Italy, or the Yeltsin Government Coalition in Russia, are not mentioned. Only their constituent parties are listed.

Of course we should always remember that the parties listed in Table 9.2 represent only a tiny fraction of those which actually exist in Europe. Most countries have literally hundreds of political parties: even tiny, recently independent Macedonia has about forty. The point about most of these mini-parties, however, is that they only compete in one or two places in some elections. In other words, they are unsuccessful and not very important for electoral or parliamentary politics. Often they exist to advertise a cause, and to promote it by getting the larger parties to think that perhaps they should ward off a potential threat to their votes by accommodating it.

Sometimes too these small parties exist because enthusiasts for a particular cause like the environment think that people must be concerned given the extent of destruction that is going on. Even if they have received little support in the past therefore they think they will get widespread support next time. Political parties are kept going by enthusiasts like these whose ideological beliefs incline them to excessive optimism. Since people’s reactions are uncertain, particularly given the enormous social changes taking place in Central and Eastern Europe, such optimism sometimes pays off. More often it is just enough to keep a small organization staggering on from election without running many candidates or attracting many votes.

The parties in Table 9.2 are therefore the relatively significant and successful parties, which have gained enough votes to get into parliament. This does not always guarantee them large numbers of representatives there. The extent to which it does, as we shall see in Chapter 10, depends on the way in which votes get translated into seats. Systems of proportional representation, where the whole object is to get a fairly exact equivalence between votes and seats, generally guarantee parties a percent of seats in parliament which corresponds to their vote. So if a party gets 25 per cent of the vote, for example, it should get nearly 25 per cent of the parliamentary seats.

Proportional representation, by awarding them parliamentary seats, can thus make small parties significant in forming or supporting governments, usually owing to the larger parties or blocs balancing each other out. This has been the case with the Free Democrats (FDP) in Germany, in contrast to the total exclusion of the more electorally successful British Liberals from power.

On the other hand, some large parties with a considerable popular following are often excluded from government by their rivals – the Popular Party in Spain during the 1980s is a case in point.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.