This edited volume contributes to a better understanding of parliamentary changes in times of political transition, and, specifically, the composition of the Greek Parliament before and after the debt crisis. It discusses the profiles of Greek MPs through the lens of continuity and renewal, starting with the first major political crisis after the Metapolitefsi in 1989 and ending with the last legislative elections of 2019. Greece attracted scholarly and international interest due to the transformations that the sovereign debt crisis provoked to its political and partisan system. It is one of the countries of the European periphery most severely hit during the great recession. However, no work so far has been devoted exclusively to the study of Greek parliamentary elites, their cultural and political characteristics, and the factors that shape their selection and election. The book is a multifaceted source of information for all those interested in understanding forms of political representation during normal times and times of crisis. Its distinctive advantage is that it offers an up to date and complete elite study in Greece comparable to similar European studies. Moreover, it is a useful tool for students, scholars and researchers interested in the study of political representation across Europe.

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

A distinguished group of scholars examine recent transitions to democracy and the prospects for democratic stability in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay. They also assess the role of elites in the longer-established democratic regimes in Columbia, Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico and Venezuela. The authors conclude that in independent states with long records of political instability and authoritarian rule, democratic consolidation requires the achievement of elite 'consensual unity' - that is, agreement among all politically important elites on the worth of existing democratic institutions and respect for democratic rules-of-the-game, coupled with increased 'structural integration' among those elites. Two processes by which consensual unity can be established are explored - elite settlement, the negotiating of compromises on basic disagreements, and elite convergence, a more subtle series of tactical decisions by rival elites which have cumulative effect, over perhaps a generation.

"Who rules in Eastern Europe?" became a fundamental question for western researchers and other observers after communist regimes were established in the region, and it gained further importance as state socialism expanded into Central Europe after the Second World War. A political order which, according to Leninist theory of the state and to subsequent Stalinist political practice, was primarily a highly centralised and repressive power organisation, directed, as if it were natural, researchers attention towards the highest echelon of office holders in party and state. Extreme centralisation of power in these regimes was consequently linked to an elitist approach to analysing them from a distant viewpoint. It is one of the many paradoxes of state socialism, that a social and political order which presumptuously claimed to be the final destination of historical development and to be based on deterministic laws of social evolution, which claimed an egalitarian nature and denied the significance of the individual, was per ceived through the idiosyncrasies, rivalries and personal traits of its rulers. The largest part of these societies remained in grey obscurity, onlyoccasion ally revealing bits of valid information about a social life distant from the centres of power. It is debatable whether this top-headedness of western re search into communist societies created a completely distorted picture of re ality, however, it certainly contributed to an overestimation of the stability of these regimes, an underestimation of their factual diversity and a misjudge ment of the extent of conflicts and cleavages dividing them.

This collection of studies deals with the evolution and metamorphoses of the political and mainly parliamentary elite in the Habsburg lands and the neighbouring countries, during the long 19th century. It comprises fourteen studies, compiled by both renowned scholars in the field and young researchers from Central and Eastern Europe.

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

Utilizing a new and original framework for examining the role of intellectuals in countries transitioning to democracy, Bozóki analyses the rise and fall of dissident intellectuals in Hungary in the late 20th century. He shows how that framework is applicable to other countries too as he forensically examines their activities. Bozóki argues that the Hungarian intellectuals did not become a ‘New Class’. By rolling transition, he means an incremental, non-violent, elite driven political transformation which is based on the rotation of agency, and it results in a new regime. This is led mainly by different groups of intellectuals who do not construct a vanguard movement but create an open network which might transform itself into different political parties. Their roles changed from dissidents to reformers, to movement organizers and negotiators through the periods of dissidence, open network building, roundtable negotiations, parliamentary activities, and new movement politics. Through the prism of political sociology, the author focuses on the following questions: Who were the dissident intellectuals and what did they want? Under what conditions do intellectuals rebel and what are the patterns of their protest? This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and public intellectuals around the world aiming to promote human rights and democracy.

The first book to provide a systematic comparison of the democratic transitions in both Eastern and Southern Europe, covering Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria.

Across the globe, more powers are being devolved to local and regional levels of government. This book provides an innovative analysis of such decentralisation in transition states in the Balkans. Using new and rich data, it shows how political elites use decentralisation strategically to ensure their access to state resources.

The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? This Oxford Handbook examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on essays from the world's leading scholars of political behavior research. The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new responsibilities for the citizenry. These political changes are paralleled by tremendous advances in our empirical knowledge of citizens and their behaviors through the institutionalization of systematic, comparative study of contemporary publics--ranging from the advanced industrial democracies to the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to new survey research on the developing world. These essays describe how citizens think about politics, how their values shape their behavior, the patterns of participation, the sources of vote choice, and how public opinion impacts on governing and public policy. This is the most comprehensive review of the cross-national literature of citizen behavior and the relationship between citizens and their governments. It will become the first point of reference for scholars and students interested in these key issues.