Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis

Front Cover
ECPR Press, 2005 - 368 pages

In this rich and broad-ranging volume, Giovanni Sartori outlines what is now recognised to be the most comprehensive and authoritative approach to the classification of party systems. He also offers an extensive review of the concept and rationale of the political party, and develops a sharp critique of various spatial models of party competition. This is political science at its best – combining the intelligent use of theory with sophisticated analytic arguments, and grounding all of this on a substantial cross-national empirical base. 

Parties and Party Systems is one of the classics of postwar political science, and is now established as the foremost work in its field.


 

Selected pages

Contents

The party as part
4
2 Pluralism
13
3 Responsible and responsive government
17
4 A rationalism
22
The party as whole
36
2 The partystate system
39
3 Oneparty pluralism
43
The preliminary framework
51
4 Twoparty systems
165
5 Predominantparty systems
172
Noncompetitive systems
194
2 Single party
198
3 Hegemonic party
205
Fluid polities and quasiparties
218
2 The African labyrinth
222
3 Ad hoc categorising
227

2 The minimal definition
53
3 An overview
58
The party from within
64
2 A scheme of analysis
67
Factions without parties?
73
Fractions within parties
79
5 The structure of opportunities
83
6 From party to faction
93
The numerical criterion
106
2 Rules for counting
108
3 A twodimensional mapping
111
Competitive systems
117
2 Testing the cases
129
3 Moderate pluralism and segmented societies
155
4 The boomerang effect
237
The overall framework
244
2 Mapping function and explanatory power
252
3 From classification to measurement
262
4 Measuring relevance
268
The idea of fractionalisation
272
6 Combining the nominal and mathematical notes
282
Spatial competition
290
2 Issues identification images and positions
293
3 Multidimensional unidimensional and ideological space
298
4 The direction of competition
306
Index
320
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Popular passages

Page 11 - By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
Page 12 - THERE is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true ; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party.
Page 9 - Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle...
Page 12 - Liberty itself will find in such a government, with powers properly distributed and adjusted, its surest guardian. It is, indeed, little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand the...

About the author (2005)

Giovanni Sartori was born in Florence, Italy, in 1924, and was appointed Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence in 1963. He has been a visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale, and in 1976 he succeeded Gabriel Almond as Professor of Political Science at Stanford. In 1979 he was appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Sartori is the author of numerous books across a range of fields in political theory and comparative politics, including Parties and Party Systems (1976), The Theory of Democracy Revisited (2 volumes, 1990), and Comparative Constitutional Engineering (2nd ed, 1997). His most recent books are Homo Videns (2nd ed, 2000), Pluralismo, Multiculturalismo, Estranei (2nd ed, 2002), and Mala Tempora (2004), which has been a bestseller in Italy. In 2005, Parties and Party Systems was also published in a Chinese translation.

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