Why do some parties live fast and die young, but others endure? And why are some party systems more stable than others? Based on a blend of data derived from both qualitative and quantitative sources, The New Party Challenge develops new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and develops conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining...

Focusing on three of the defining moments of the twentieth century - the end of the two World Wars and the collapse of the Iron Curtain - this volume presents a rich collection of authoritative essays, covering a wide range of thematic, regional, temporal and methodological perspectives. By re-examining the traumatic legacies of the century’s three major conflicts, the volume illuminates a number of recurrent yet differentiated ideas concerning memorialisation, mythologisation, mobilisatio...

What impact has EU membership had on party politics in Central and Eastern Europe? Although there is an emerging body of literature on the Europeanization of political parties, most of these accounts focus exclusively on Western Europe. Drawing on a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches including detailed studies of party programmes and manifestos, analysis of the media, semi-structured interviews and expert surveys, this collection provides not just conceptually informed, but a...

Excerpted from Niall Ferguson’s sprawling bestseller The War of the World, The Abyss now stands on its own as one of the most thrilling short histories of World War I ever written. This is not a conventional military history about battles and generals. Rather, The Abyss examines how World War I saw the birth of total war—fought between societies as much as armies—and must therefore be understood in terms of the financial crises it unleashed, the multinational emp...

The fast-developing relationship between China and Europe has become one of the most important in international affairs. China-Europe Relations takes an innovative and insightful look at this phenomenon, examining:the state of Chinese studies in Europe and European studies in Chinathe decision-making behind the EU’s China policy, and what the Chinese perceptions and assessments are of Europe that shape China’s Europe policy

This is a comprehensive history of political violence during Europe's incredibly violent twentieth century. Leading scholars examine the causes and dynamics of war, revolution, counterrevolution, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and state repression. They locate these manifestations of political violence within their full transnational and comparative contexts and within broader trends in European history from the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteen...

The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe analyses the state of play of democracy at the subnational level in the 27 member states of the EU plus Norway and Switzerland. It places subnational democracy in the context of the distinctive Anglo, the French, the German and Scandinavian state traditions in Europe asking to what extent these are still relevant today. The Handbook adapts Lijphart's theory of democracy and applies it to the subnational levels ...

‘This is comparative history on a grand scale, skilfully analysing complex national debates and drawing major conclusions without ever losing the necessary nuances of interpretation.’Stefan Berger, University of Manchester, UKRemembering the Road to World War Two is a broad and comparative international survey of the historiography of the origins of the Second World War. It explores how, in the case of each of the major combatant countries, historical writing on th...

The European Union’s (EU) membership conditionality has been perceived as a highly effective means of influence on non-member states in the run-up to the 2004 and 2007 enlargements. According to the incentive-based explanation that dominates the literature, conditionality has been particularly effective when the EU offered a credible membership incentive and when governments did not consider the domestic costs of compliance threatening to their hold on power.This volume challenges ...

In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a libera...

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state. Newly written and researched by experts in their respective fields, individual chapters trace developments in German culture - including national identity, ...

This book presents a comparative perspective to the study of European politics, focusing on the unique and transformative effect of European Union on the politics of its member states - in effect, the Europeanization of European politics. For no other world region is there a similar intensity of Treaty and other obligations on a set of neighboring states, nor a comparable depth of of supranational governance. The concept of Europeanism as an evaluative theme is used to explore this unique,...