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This chapter describes the development of political parties and the electoral system in Hong Kong, and analyzes the problems that have confronted their development. Political parties started to develop in the 1980s as a result of gradual democratization in Hong Kong. As the talks on the political future of Hong Kong were well underway, political parties also mushroomed, which were generally divided into pro-democracy and pro-China camps. Such a division has lasted until today, and the two camps are varied, to different degrees, in their political ideologies, and positions on labour, welfare, economic, and livelihood issues. Despite their long history, political parties in Hong Kong are remarkably weak and are confronted by various obstacles, such as the anti-politics stance of the CPG. Like party development, Hong Kong's electoral experience has also been unique. The chapter traces the change of direct election formula to a proportional representation system, and its effects such as the change in campaign strategies and strategic voting.

The chapter explains how the psychological legitimization of the occupation emerged by presenting the various orientations regarding the status of the occupied territories and the perceptions of the Palestinian nation that have prevailed among Israeli Jews from 1967 until the present. It focuses on their reflection in the platforms of the political parties, in the beliefs of the leaders and in public opinion. Viewing the territories as being liberated because they are part of the Jewish homeland, and as belonging exclusively to Jews, and/or that these territories are of supreme importance to secure the existence of the State of Israel, has had imprinting effects on the issue of determining borders, removal of settlements and the division of Jerusalem, as well as on the establishment of a Palestinian State. This view was marginal before the 1967 war, but with the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip it has become a dominant position among the Jewish-Israeli leaders, elite and the public.

The chapter argues that the policy of settling a Jewish population in areas in the occupied territories derives from the ability of the radical right-wing parties to maneuver between the needs of their constituency and their ideological commitments. Unlike other accounts of Israel’s policy regarding the 1967 territories, the chapter shows that in order to fully explain the policy one needs to relate to the strategic aspects of the Israeli polity, rather than adhering to general structuralist claims about it.

From a historical-institutionalist and firm-centered perspective, decisions on the division of labor between firms, associations, and the state in providing and financing skills are the core factor accounting for different skill formation systems. From this it follows that, alongside the degree of firm involvement in the provision of vocational training and the degree of public commitment to vocational training, four different skill formation systems can be distinguished: the liberal, the segmentalist, the collective, and the statist. Collective skill formation systems are the result of political struggles with regard to four neuralgic points of conflict: the division of labor between the state, employers, their associations, and individuals first on the provision and then on the financing of vocational education and training (VET); the relationship between firm autonomy and public oversight in the provision of training; and the linkages between VET and the general education system.

This chapter examines party-funding. The radical reform inherent in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 quickly proved inadequate to the challenges of regulating an area so central to party competition. The founding legislation was not sufficiently clear about donor transparency, and the Electoral Commission was uncertain about how to calibrate regulatory burdens, and how to allocate its resources across the complex nature of its mission. This brought the Commission into tension with its original architect, the CSPL, and underlined the difficulty faced by the Commission as it struggled to sustain necessary political support from Parliament and from the parties. The new system, unquestionably a major advance over what went before in terms of transparency, nevertheless in several respects actually stimulated greater controversy, with compliance issues becoming particularly controversial where previously they had not existed.

This chapter examines parties and party system change across the MENA countries since December 2010. The discussion begins with a brief overview of party systems in the region on the eve of the Arab Spring, thereby providing a quick introduction to the selected cases as well as a benchmark against which to measure change. Party system change is determined via indicators such as the effective number of parties, party system fragmentation, electoral volatility and the entry of new parties into the system. The analysis of the indicators of party system change is coupled with a discussion of empirical data on the political environment during and in the immediate aftermath of the elections, including issues such as regime classification, rotation of power, coalition structures, prohibited parties, and societal cleavages. The author explains how - despite the fact that some old regimes fell and elections were held - the traditionally dominant or hegemonic political parties stayed preeminent in a number of MENA countries. Finally, this chapter shows what party system change tells us about the prospects for democracy some five years after the outbreak of the Arab Spring.

Political parties in democratic countries use very different procedures to make their most important decisions, and they follow different approaches to mobilizing their supporters. What, if any, are the political consequences of these differences? This chapter argues that we should answer this question by systematically testing causal links in mid-level theories. To this end, the authors present a framework that divides parties’ organizations into three key dimensions: structures, resources, and representational strategies. They further divide these dimensions into sub-dimensions that have been identified as politically relevant by previous research, and show how they relate to specific hypotheses about the impact of parties’ organizational differences. These hypotheses are the basis of key research questions examined in the other chapters of this book. This chapter also introduces the new data source that will be used for all the analyses in this volume, the Political Party Database.

This chapter examines the role played by political parties and think tanks in the development of policy analysis in France. It shows how party-based policy analysis is interwoven with inter and intra-party competition related to the objective of seeking office. Indeed, even though policy seeking activities do not look central in the functioning of French political parties, developments in party rationales, like those in the profile of governing parties’ elites, are favourable to intensifying interest in policy issues. Political parties’ professionalization nonetheless appears to have a marked effect on their internal production of public policy expertise: party membership is marginalised while the electoral issues and internal competition have a structuring impact. Lastly, analysis of public policy expertise production shows that it is mainly done in the vicinity of party organisations, due to the significant recourse to experts outside of parties and the role of think tanks.

A range of contemporary European societies have witnessed a decline in formal political participation. In many countries, turnout at elections, and membership of political parties and trade unions is in decline. Yet there seem to be counter trends, with an increase in activist political participation (marches and demonstrations). In this chapter we will examine these developments to assess how citizens in contemporary Europe express themselves politically, and investigate whether declining engagement with formal politics should be seen as a problem for citizenship. To a large extent, the answer to this question depends upon how one views citizenship theoretically.

Chapter 1 investigates Lebanese Armenians’ triangulations and balancing acts vis-à-vis the Lebanese state, its wider Arab environment, and the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) around the time of Lebanon’s independence in the mid 1940s. I pursue this inquiry by closely analyzing Armenian language newspapers published in Beirut. These often ideologically opposed newspapers, the leftist Ararad, the communist Joghovourti Tzain, the capitalist yet supporter of the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic (ASSR) Zartonk, and the firmly right-wing nationalist Dashnak Aztag reflected the issues of interest of the day. I explore four themes. The first is Armenians’ position in and vis-à-vis the Lebanese polity as well as vis-à-vis Syria. A second concerns language, and specifically the multiple roles of Arabic and its relationship with Armenian. The next one has to do with the ambiguities of spaces relevant for Armenians in and beyond Lebanon, including the ASSR. And a last one concerns the fascinating political positioning of the church that, although conservative, felt forced to support communist Armenia and the USSR as the ASSR’s protector.

This chapter addresses the role of public funding in party organizational transformation. Focusing mainly on European democracies, and using the new systematic data obtained from the Political Party Database, this chapter makes two contributions to the party politics literature. First, a range of existing findings about the importance of state subsidies for party life are re-examined, probing in particular the extent to which party incomes depend on public funding, as opposed to private donations and membership fees. Second, the association between parties’ dependence on state subsidies and party organization is explored, probing in particular the relationship between public monies and the size of parties’ memberships. Unlike the first exploration, which largely confirms most existing conclusions about the patterns of party financing, the findings from the second exploration appear to be more challenging: contrary to usual expectations, state funding of political parties does not necessarily undermine party membership.

This chapter looks at the general environment surrounding party finance in the UK. Political parties remain key institutions in British politics, channelling interests, developing and promulgating policy agendas, recruiting political elites, and mobilising voters through their campaign activities. But the decline of the mass party model and of strong partisan alignments, the growing importance of national campaign strategies and growing public scepticism regarding politicians present parties with serious challenges, not least around finding adequate funds to run their campaigning activities. Parties increasingly have to balance the need to obtain scarce funding with public concerns over the potential for large-scale donors to buy influence and an increasingly strict regulatory environment. Despite widespread belief to the contrary, however, British elections in the early 21^st century are no more expensive, in real terms, than contests in the mid-20th century. What is more, even though the headline figures involved sound large, the actual costs of UK elections are modest compared to elections in the USA, and to other more frivolous activities.

This chapter analyses the activities of Brazil's main political parties since the early 1990s in a study of constitutional amendments submitted during the period. It draws attention to the fact that, in the day-to-day activities of Brazil's Congress, policy is not produced exclusively by the parties between which national contests for the Executive are polarised (the PT and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB). Unlike other routine ballots and activities, constitutional amendments reflect the political agenda of the major parties and the actions of their key leaders. The study corroborates the argument that the parties function more as processors of ideas produced outside their institutional environment than as original producers. By analysing each proposed constitutional amendment in the context of the corresponding cycle of government, it reveals that the PT administration coincided with a reduction in ideological polarisation on matters such as tax, political and social security reform.

Chapter 7 offers an examination of political discourses and the composition of Latvian politics. It is argued that the realm of politics is largely responsible for artificially inflating ethnic tensions and reinforcing group boundaries in Latvia. Data is examined from interviews with representatives from Latvian political parties alongside analysis of political initiatives that have mobilised ethnically demarcated groups. The analysis traces the peculiarities of Latvia’s ethnic (rather than ideological or policy-based) party political spectrum. This spectrum, it is argued, often encourages political entrepreneurs to pursue discursive strategies that strengthen internal (ethnic) group identities. The ethnicisation of Latvian politics is explored by examining various language and education policies.

This chapter explores the different ways in which the EU has been associated with Northern Ireland politics in the broadest sense – i.e. how it has contributed to addressing the conflict and also its impact on political parties, interest groups and notions of identity. It notes that the EU’s impact on resolving the Northern Ireland conflict has been largely benign. For Northern Ireland political parties, the EU has typically been an issue of low political salience. Interest groups traditionally played an important role in terms of delivering services and engaging with the EU, but the introduction of devolution has undermined their role and vitality. On issues of identity, the EU has not had a neutralising impact on national identity. The question of governance. In terms of political dynamics, the EU has not produced a more governance-driven approach in Northern Ireland.

Of the three regions that attained statehood in 2000, Jharkhand had the longest running movement for statehood. Multiple parties, outfits and actors had campaigned for a separate tribal state, employing different tactics, arguments and with different degrees of intensity. In Uttarakhand, new social movements had emerged in the 1970s but it was only in the mid-1990s that there was a concerted campaign for statehood. This chapter looks at why statehood became a more singular objective for social movement actors in both regions from the late 1980s onwards, and why some political parties, especially the BJP, also adopted statehood as a goal. In both Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, unlike Chhattisgarh, where no popular movement emerged, social movement actors and political parties came to focus more single-mindedly on the achievement of statehood as a priority in itself and as a means of achieving control of the state. The chapters shows that interactions between social movement actors, political parties and the state helped to produce a focus on statehood that functioned as a lowest common denominator among actors with divergent interests.