Mildred A. Schwartz

Local Parties in Political and Organizational Perspective

Theoretical Orientation And Empirical Observations The Local Party as an Object of Interdisciplinary Comparative Study: Some Steps Toward Theoretical Integration (Hans Geser) Local Parties in Comparative Perspective (Peter John and Martin Saiz) Local Political Parties In Local And National Context Civic Parties in Canada: Their Diversity and Evolution (Pierre Filion) Local Parties in England: Development and Change 19731994 (Colin Rollings and Michael Thrasher) Local Parties in the German Countryside (Herbert Schneider) Local Parties and Electioneering in Germany: Local Political Messages in an Era of Nationalized Political Communication (Susan E. Scarrow) Do Political Parties Matter in U.S. Cities? (Martin Saiz) Forms of Patronage and Political Parties in the Italian City (Annick Magnier) Local Parties in Switzerland: An Active Pillar of the Swiss Political System (Andreas Ladner) Local Party Organizations in Denmark: Crisis or Adaptation? (Roger Buch Jensen) The Local Party System in Poland (Zbigniew Zychowicz) From Communist Predominance to Multi-party System: The Change in the Local Party System in Russia, 1986-1995 (Sabine Kropp) Conclusion Political Parties in National and Local Context (Martin Saiz)

Interactions Between Social Movements and US Political Parties

Interactions between US political parties and social movements range from those that emphasize closeness to those that seek to preserve distance. Although previously unrecognized in organizational analysis, these strategies are similar to ones of bridging and buffering. Where they differ both from inter-organizational relations among firms and from among other non-profits, this is due to the importance movements attach to autonomy, manifested in their antagonistic reactions to political parties and rooted in the importance they attach to ideology.

Cultural and Institutional Factors Affecting Political Contention over Moral Issues

Abortion and same-sex marriage are moral issues that remain highly contentious in the political life of the United States compared to other countries. This level of contention is explained through comparison with Canada. Contrasts in culture and institutions shaping issues and the political avenues that allow their enactment account for differences in the tenor of politics in the two countries.

Partisan Stability and the Continuity of a Segmented Society: The Austrian Case

Austria has been described as a prototypic segmented society. Religion, social class, and ideology produce sharp distinctions that are incorporated into all aspects of the political life of the country. With pressures from secularization and rising living standards, it can be questioned from secularization and rising living standards, it can be questioned whether current voter loyalties should be solely related to historic ties with parties. A survey conducted in Austria in 1968 demonstrated that, beyond the organizational continuity of parties and the persistence of social cleavages, there was a separate line of continuity for partisan stability associated with the nature of group ties. While the group benefits that come from a particular party are not always evident, the social bonds linking individuals to parties in a sense bypass this political content. Some of the qualities of Austrian political life for example, the lengthy experience of a coalition government that established a system for sharing administrative offices on the basis of party affiliation are unique, but this should not obscure the more general relevance of the findings: that primary group ties continue to have a political importance even when the structural bases of the ties are weakened.

Austria's Consistent Voters

The history of mass participation in Austrian politics, now nearly a century in duration, has been marked by polarization along lines of religion, social class, and ideology. This is a product of Austria’s division into Lager (camps) (Wandruska, 1954, Diamant, 1958), similar to the Dutch zuilen (pillars) (Lorwin, 1971; Lijphart, 1968; Daalder, 1966; Dunn, 1972). These camps include the now virtually defunct German-nationalist, which declined after 1918 and was only temporarily revived by Hitler from 1930 to 1945. Much more important are the clerical-conservative and the labour-socialist camps. They

Book review: When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American HistorySchlozmanDaniel, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015; xii + 267 pp.: ISBN13: 978 0 691 16469 4, £79.95 (hbk); 978 0 691 16470 0£24.95 (pbk), 13: 978 1 400 87383 8 (ebk)

and perspectives, ranging from the more descriptive accounts of Britain to Ivan Bruneau’s excellent analysis based on activist interviews, to more statistical approaches. This is both a strength and a source of frustration to the reader, as we do not have comparable accounts of activists in states other than France. One continuity that does emerge is how the political and social institutions that served as the bridge between state and rural society as the post-war consensus were captured by a powerful stratum of rural society that became hegemonic and closed to outsiders. Yet as neo-liberalism dislocated rural society, the old institutions proved ineffective in defending rural interests. However, they have steadfastly defended their place in the political hierarchy. The response of the rural hegemons to dissent is: ‘initial ridicule, rejection and marginalisation of dissenters is followed by an uncredited emulation of their concepts and practices’ (p. 130). For the new movements’ anger is not just against policies but the system and their exclusion from it. The historical aspect of rural populism is underdeveloped; it appears in some chapters, notably Lucardie and Vorman’s, but elsewhere it is strikingly absent and the wider history of rural populism and protest is unexplored. Contemporary protests build on long traditions of dissent in the countryside (Narkiewicz, 1976; Paxton, 1997). Exploring this would have given the book more depth and helped contextualized rural dissent. Theoretically, the book is heavily dependent upon Cas Mudde’s work. The literature on rural populism is limited and there was an opportunity to go beyond Mudde in exploring rural populism and its relationship to the social structure of the countryside. The problems with using ideological thinness and the deployment of a discourse of pure against the corrupt (Mudde, 2000) to define rural parties as populist is that it ignores the impact of the social structure of the countryside, and its peripheral position nationally, has upon parties’ strategies. The heterogeneity of rural society means that developed policy and ideology is divisive and potentially limits support (Wright, 1964; Varley, 2010). Rural politicians have always been aware of this problem (Madgearu, 1924: 67) and the ‘absence’ of ideology is a conscious strategic response. Similarly, the deployment of the pure people against the corrupt centre is a response to the peripheral position of the countryside. By using this definition of populism, it inevitably encompasses almost all rural parties and leads to misclassification of parties as populist, for example, the inter-war Polish and Romanian agrarians. The distinction between radical and moderate rural politics could have been drawn out further alongside alternative strategies adopted by rural parties such as office-seeking (Batory and Sitter, 2004). This is important because the four-way battle in the countryside between rural and national parties, radical and mainstream is clear. We observe parties seeking to remain the true voice of the countryside, others that seek to transcend their rural origins and become national (Jungar on the True Finns), national parties that have long taken rural voters for granted, or populist movements seeking to expand into the countryside (Ivaldi and Gombin on Front National). Despite the limits, this book is a significant and vital contribution to the study of rural politics and populism. Although the book concludes with the view that rural populism is declining as a political force, the book amply demonstrates that it remains part of modern politics and the variety of forms, approaches and success shows that there is scope for more study of this under-researched area of political life.

Book review: The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy

(p. 216) and the book concludes with the assertion that despite the challenges political parties or whatever new forms they may evolve, ‘they are here for the long haul’ (p. 231). With a sub-title like How Parties Organize Democracy, and a promise of focusing ‘on the actions of political parties as organizations’ (p. 12), one might have expected to learn how political parties act to control and manage the electoral and governmental processes. While some attention is given to examining party activity in the discussion of their place in the electoral process, evidence for most of the analyses comes from the CSES voter surveys done during the first decade of this century. So, for instance, party mobilization is understood in terms of voter accounts, not party practices; party positioning in terms of voter perceptions, not party claims. While this reliance on survey data opens new and rich perspectives on the linkage chain, it does not say much about what political parties actually do and how they operate. It might have been fairer to subtitle the book How Partisanship Shapes Democracy. Analysing the relative ability of political parties to successfully ‘fulfil their basic functions’ is notoriously difficult given the shifting notion of just how we define a party. In Political Parties and Democratic Linkage, the authors appear to adopt different perspectives depending on the linkage function they are concerned with. Thus it appears to be the party on the ground that is crucial for local mobilization activity (chapter 3), the party in public office that positions the party on the Left–Right spectrum (chapter 5), and the party in central office that negotiates coalitions and agrees to public policy (chapter 7). While all of this is seen indirectly through the survey responses of voters, a comprehensive account of the party government model would want to consider the ways in which these distinctive dimensions of party life are connected and with what consequence for the central issue of democratic accountability. It is no small challenge to use the evidence of 36 democracies to measure the implicit capacity of political parties to dominate and integrate the linkages that knit together contemporary practice in electoral democracies. Dalton, Farrell and McAllister have managed to do it in a relatively short, clear and accessible fashion that is bound to become a new starting point for debates about the role and importance of political parties. This is a book for scholars, students and citizens.

The Changing Canadian Population

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,

Book Review: Robin Archer, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

the need for citizen representation and, in the end, might – as Mair (2005) has argued elsewhere – lead to the de-legitimization and the eventual decline of political parties altogether. To give a final answer to the questions of whether the latter is a likely scenario and whether there is a general trend for parties to become and remain agencies of ‘de-democratization’ (Lawson, 1998: 353), comparative work is urgently required. When Parties Prosper provides an important source for all those interested in the survival strategies of political parties and their consequences for the very nature of the political process beyond the realm of Western democracies.

19.95, xvii + 348 pp. ISBN 978 0 691 12701 9

How much does money affect the outcome of elections? Do those who help finance candidates exert undue influence in the making of public policy? In this landmark book, one of Americas most distinguished political scientists explores the dynamics and consequences of campaign finance in America and explodes many myths about this widely debated subject. Frank J. Sorauf provides balanced and informative commentary on such critical issues in campaign financing as: the growing problems of regulating American campaign finance under the post-Watergate legislation of 1974; the forces that affect the supply of money available for campaigning, from economic conditions to the competitiveness of elections; the increasing power of incumbent candidates in the two-way exchange between candidates and contributors; political learning and the search for ways to avoid the laws on campaign finance; the myths and realities about the role and influence of PACs; the vanishing funds for public funding of the presidential campaigns; the new middlemen and brokers