This pioneering analysis uses the results from the first ever Irish election study to provide a comprehensive survey of the motives, outlook and behaviour of voters in the Republic of Ireland. Building on the foundations laid down by previous work on comparative electoral behaviour, it explores long-term influences on vote choice, such as party loyalties and enduring values, as well as short-term ones, such as the economy, the party leaders and the candidates themselves. It also examines how people use their vote and why so many people do not vote at all.Many features of Irish elections make such a detailed study particularly important. The single transferable vote system allows voters an unusual degree of freedom to pick the candidates they prefer, while electoral trends observed elsewhere can be found in a more extreme form in Ireland. For example, attachment to parties is very low, differences between them are often obscure, candidate profiles are very high and turnout is falling rapidly. However, Irish elections defy international trends in other respects, most notably in the degree of personal contact parties and candidates make with their voters. Findings are presented in a manner that is highly accessible to anyone with an interest in elections, electoral systems and electoral behaviour. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish politics and is an important text for students of European Politics, Parties and Elections, Comparative Politics and Political Sociology.

This is a study of the structure of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s. Based upon archival and published sources, the work describes the events in the Bolshevik Party leading up to the Great Purges of 1937-1938. Professor Getty concludes that the party bureaucracy was chaotic rather than totalitarian, and that local officials had relative autonomy within a considerably fragmented political system. The Moscow leadership, of which Stalin was the most authoritarian actor, reacted to social and political processes as much as instigating them. Because of disputes, confusion, and inefficiency, they often promoted contradictory policies. Avoiding the usual concentration on Stalin's personality, the author puts forward the controversial hypothesis that the Great Purges occurred not as the end product of a careful Stalin plan, but rather as the bloody but ad hoc result of Moscow's incremental attempts to centralise political power.

This book is about the evolution of the communist movement in the Russian Federation from the last years of the U.S.S.R.’s existence through Russia’s presidential elections of June july 1996, when the chief contenders were the incumbent president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and his communist challenger, Gennadii A. Ziuganov. Our main protagonist is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or CPRF as it is commonly called. But the CPRF was a latecomer to the post-Soviet communist playing field. Its formal establishment came only in February 1993, well after the formation of a number of more doctrinaire communist parties which initially competed with the CPRF and influenced its political profile and conduct in numerous, if not always readily apparent, ways. All of these new Russian CPs emerged from the rubble of what had been the mighty and supposedly monolithic Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union (CPSU). On the Marxist-Leninist political spectrum, however, the range of the official positions espoused by these post-Soviet neocommunist groups was more comparable to that of the international communist movement as a whole in the post-Stalin era than to the CPSU under Nikita S. Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev.

One of the most unexpected outcomes of the Soviet bloc's transition out of communism has been the divergent but important paths followed by once ruling communist parties. In Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania those parties transformed themselves into pro-Western free market center leftists who have won elections and formed governing coalitions periodically since the early 1990s. The result has been former communists leading their countries into NATO and the EU even as their conservative opponents continue to condemn them for their communist past. No less surprising has been the ability of anti-Western neo-Leninist communist parties in Russia and Ukraine to win sizable pluralities of votes in free competitive elections. Their very strength has contributed to blocking genuine democratic alternation of power. By employing a unique cross-regional comparative framework The Left Transformed explores the divergent trajectories of ex-ruling communist parties in key countries of the former Soviet Empire. In-depth interviews, party presses and primary documents, and national election data provide a foundation for the most up-to-date examination of party transition, organization, ideology, and electoral fortunes through late 2002. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary history, political parties, or comparative government in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Publisher description.

Political parties are the fabric of democratic politics. In 1991 a new Russia emerged after seven decades of one-party dictatorship, claiming to be on the road towards democracy. In this volume the authors analyse the many contradictions, dilemmas, and paradoxes of reconstituting free party politics and democratic rule in a severely traumatized country. Frequently from a comparative perspective they deal with a range of topics, from the behaviour of the new parties in parliament, the role of ideology in cementing party organizations, to the character and prospects of the transient Russian party system.

The sudden collapse of communism stimulated both the rapid emergence of fledgling democracies and scholarly attention to the post-communist transition. These newly democratized parliaments have been described as "parliaments in adolescence". This book identifies six parliaments which exemplify the wide range of developments in the new post-communist political systems, from the stable consolidated democracies to the less stable and more authoritarian states, within which their respective parliaments function. Finally the post-communist parliaments are compared with the presumptively more established west European parliaments. This book bridges the usual gap in research between the post-communist parliaments and more "normal" democratic parliaments to develop a common legislative research perspective on both new and established parliaments. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Legislative Studies.

One of the world's best-known Russian scholars and a former consultant to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin analyzes the events that have transpired in the Russian federation since late August 1991, from the drastic liberalization of prices and "shock therapy" to the privatization of state owned property and Yeltsin's resignation and replacement by Vladimir Putin.

An analysis of local legislative and budgetary politics during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period with case studies of electoral behaviour, distribution processes, political contestation, and institutional development.

Examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the 1990s. The work illustrates developments regarding different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in alliances. Wider groups of countries are also compared.