Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Spoon, Jae-Jae

Titel

Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe

Ist Teil von

• University of Michigan Press, 2011, 240 pp, 2011

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. This study, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems. The author employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these Green Parties have developed as organizations and now run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties' survival, it is asserted, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals. Tables, Figures.