Diversificación y reconfiguración de los sistemas de partidos de las democracias postindustriales

Desde el final de la II Guerra Mundial hasta nuestros días los sistemas de partidos tradicionalesse han desmoronado o, cuando menos, han sufrido grandes cambios. En esteartículo describo este cambio, expongo sus causas y explico cómo han operado para llegara modificar los sistemas de partidos tradicionales. Las preferencias políticas de los ciudadanossurgen principalmente, aunque no sólo, a partir de la inserción de los ciudadanosen el mercado de trabajo, la familia y las organizaciones empresariales. El proceso depostindustrialización y los cambios impuestos al desarrollo de los estados del bienestarhan dado lugar a diferentes pautas y trayectorias que han influido y continúan influyendoen la distribución de preferencias políticas de los ciudadanos. En el nivel macro, ha habidoun cambio en los ejes de la distribución de preferencias políticas: en dos fases distintas,se ha pasado de la prioridad del eje de las políticas distributivas (derecha-izquierda) ala del eje de las estructuras de gobernanza sociocultural (autoritario-liberal). Estos cambiosen los ejes de preferencias tienen implicaciones para las estrategias de los partidospolíticos. Los partidos son sensibles a las preferencias de los ciudadanos, como lo pruebael descenso del clientelismo, y en consecuencia se adaptan a sus cambios, siempre dentrodel margen de posibilidades que les ofrece la estructura social, su propio historial partidistay, por supuesto, las condiciones económicas restrictivas y la crisis de los estados del bienestarvigentes. Como consecuencia de este proceso los sistemas de partidos se han complejizadoy se han diversificado, dejando en manos de los movimientos sociales y los gruposde interés amplios ámbitos de actuación: toda la serie de temas y ámbitos de competiciónelectoral que no pueden interpretarse dentro del espacio definido por los dos ejes dedistribución de preferencias que rige la competición partidista

From stability to stagnation: Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century

"Among political and economic elites as well as in public opinion a sense of malanaise has spread across Germany since the mid-1990s, after the initial enthusiasm about German unification, the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of European integration. In the early 1980s West Germany was widely celebrated, and indeed celebrated itself, as an island of economic prosperity, social peace and political stability in an increasingly turbulent world. Reflecting the opinion of the time, 'West European Politics' published a Special Issue in 1981 under the title of 'Germany: Perspectives on a Stable State'. During the 1970s and early 1980s, when the United States was in a deep crisis of economic performance and public confidence, the German industrial strategy of 'diversified quality production' became an admired model world-wide, echoing Helmut Schmidt's proclamation of 'Modell Deutschland' in his first election campaign of 1976 when he prided himself on his government's achievement of apparently unshakeable tripartite consensus with business and labour." (excerpt

Vínculos entre ciudadanos y políticos: una introducción

[ES] La movilización etnocultural y su impacto en los vínculos entre ciudadanos y políticos en una comunidad política son importantes condicionantes de las circunstancias político económicas, el desarrollo y especialmente la competición partidista. Ambos aumentan la politización de la gobernanza económica y la intensa competición partidista posibilita que se acreciente la movilización etnocultural, de manera que los políticos tienen fuertes incentivos para desarrollar relaciones principal-agente clientelares. El desarrollo económico puede tener una influencia ambivalente, pero cuanto más posibilita una mayor prosperidad social, hace más accesibles los recursos para el juego redistributivo que moviliza a grupos etnoculturales alrededor de relaciones clientelares. Por supuesto, la movilización etnocultural se mantiene exógena a todos los demás factores causales en el grado que debe existir un espacio de viabilidad de indicadores culturales –preferentemente indicadores también asociados con impactos distributivos en la división del trabajo y la distribución de recompensas económicas en una sociedad– sin los cuales los políticos no podrían siquiera concebir una estrategia prometedora de interés en movilización etnocultural

Political trust and historical legacy: the effect of varieties of socialism

This paper, unlike the vast existing literature on political trust, focuses on trust in post-socialist countries, and more specifically on their emerging elites, rather than on their general populations. Studying emerging elites is important in the context of establishing democracy and the survival of democracy. We stipulate that political trust is significantly determined by historical legacy: type of socialist regime, accounting for path dependence and thus, for pre- socialist legacies. Utilizing individual-level data from an institutional survey, we find that distinguishing between different types of socialism is instrumental in explaining trust of emerging elites. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at fostering political trust in post-socialist countries and more importantly for discerning future patterns of political and social developments

Dimensionality, ideology and party positions towards European integration

<p>The rise of political contestation over European integration has led many scholars to examine the role that broader ideological positions play in structuring party attitudes towards European integration. This article extends the existing approaches in two important ways. First, it shows that whether the dimensionality of politics is imagined in a one-dimensional ‘general left‒right’ form or a two-dimensional ‘economic left‒right/social liberal-conservative’ form leads to very different understandings of the way ideology has structured attitudes towards European integration, with the two-dimensional approach offering greater explanatory power. Second, existing approaches have modelled the influence of ideology on attitudes towards European integration as a static process. This article shows that the relationship between ideology and European integration has changed substantially over the history of European integration: divisions over social issues have replaced economic concerns as the main driver of party attitudes towards European integration.</p

Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent

Political parties and democratic consolidation in post-communist societies

Political parties have a central role to play in democratic consolidation, yet we know comparatively little about how effectively they represent social cleavages in newly emerging democracies. Using the Lipset–Rokkan framework, this article examines the role of parties in articulating social cleavages in 14 established and 6 emerging democracies using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems datasets. The results show that the social cleavages in the emerging democracies are similar to those of the established democracies, with religion and class predominating. Parties appear to be less effective in representing social cleavages in the emerging than in the established democracies

Nuclear energy in the public sphere: Anti-nuclear movements vs. industrial lobbies in Spain (1962-1979)

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11024-014-9263-0This article examines the role of the Spanish Atomic Forum as the representative of the nuclear sector in the public arena during the golden years of the nuclear power industry from the 1960s to 1970s. It focuses on the public image concerns of the Spanish nuclear lobby and the subsequent information campaigns launched during the late 1970s to counteract demonstrations by the growing and heterogeneous anti-nuclear movement. The role of advocacy of nuclear energy by the Atomic Forum was similar to that in other countries, but the situation in Spain had some distinguishing features. Anti-nuclear protest in Spain peaked in 1978 paralleling the debates of a new National Energy Plan in Congress, whose first draft had envisaged a massive nuclearization of the country. We show how the approval of the Plan in July 1979, with a significant reduction in the nuclear energy component, was influenced by the anti-nuclear protest movements in Spain. Despite the efforts of the Spanish Atomic Forum to counter its message, the anti-nuclear movement was strengthened by reactions to the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979