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Hauptseminar (Master): Perspektiven auf den Staat: Parties and Party Systems in Western Europe
Mi, 14-16 Uhr
Seminar Description
Political parties are key players in modern mass democracy. Against this background, this seminar seeks to elucidate how party political competition in various Western European countries is structured, how the current party systems emerged and evolved over time, and to what extent the logic of political competition has changed as a reaction to both internal and external pressures. In the context of our discussion of party systems, we will not only deal with the ideological profiles of political parties but also with the underlying political preferences of voters and with the impact of changing mass preferences on the structure of party systems.
The first part of the seminar starts from Lipset and Rokkan’s seminal work on the impact of deeply-rooted societal cleavages between centre and periphery, church and state, urban and rural constituencies, and capital and labour on the shaping of modern party systems. In particular, we discuss Lipset and Rokkan’s “freezing hypothesis”, according to which Western European party systems in the post-war period are still dominated by the old class-based left-right competition of the 1920s.
This forms the background of the second part of the seminar, which addresses the issue of party system change. We look at a range of contributions suggesting that traditional societal cleavages have lost ground in favour of new lines of conflict within Western European societies. In this context, we discuss the rise of Green or New Left parties, right-wing populist and Eurosceptic political parties against the background of societal phenomena such as the growing importance of post-materialist values as well as the impact of globalization and European integration.
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| Literatur |
Introductory Reading
Crotty, William S./Richard S. Katz (eds.), 2006: Handbook of Party Politics. London: Sage.
Dalton, Russel J./Hans-Dieter Klingemann (eds.), 2007: The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mair, Peter (ed.), 1990: The West European Party System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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| Leistungsnachweis |
Requirements
In order to pass the seminar, students are required to write a paper of about 13-15 pages on a topic related to the seminar theme. Papers may also be written by teams of two students, in which
case the paper will have to be about 26-30 pages in length. The grade of the seminar paper will form the final grade of the seminar or, in the case of students required to pass Module 5 (“Institutional Foundations”), it will form the seminar’s share in the grade for the whole module. In addition, students
are required to participate actively in seminar discussions, prepare the weekly reading assignments, and submit a further assignment (such as a summary of seminar discussions, a presentation etc.).
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