Jonathan Hopkin

London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Government

The expanding literature on growth regimes has recently been applied to explain the growth of populist movements across the OECD. Such applications posit a stand-off between debtors and creditors as the core conflict that generates populism. While insightful, the theory has problems explaining why, in some European countries, such movements pre-dat...

Southern Europe’s debtor nations need far-reaching structural reforms if they are to prosper within the strictures of the single currency, runs the constant refrain of the Euro crisis. 1 Yet Italy, the target of many such recent complaints, had already transformed its economy fundamentally over the past two decades, among other reasons in order tha...

The vote for Brexit is not an isolated event, but part of a wave of populist, anti-elite revolts: a new ‘anti-system’ politics Western democracies are experiencing, shaking the existing consensus around economic integration, free markets and liberal values. This wave takes a variety of forms, but has in common a robust, even violent, rejection of t...

In this introduction to the special issue “The New Politics of Inequality in Europe,” recent literature on income inequality in the advanced democracies is summarized. It is argued that dominant accounts are too heavily focused on the United States, whereas the experience of Western European countries has been neglected. Although income inequality...

Since 1970 the United Kingdom, like the United States, has developed a “winner-take-all” political economy characterized by widening inequality and spectacular income growth at the top of the distribution. However, Britain’s centralized executive branch and relatively insulated policymaking process are less amenable to the kind of “organized combat...

In this paper we subject Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s ‘winner-take-all’ to comparative scrutiny by examining the politics of rising inequality and top income growth in the UK. The US and the UK, despite key differences in their economic structures, constitutional arrangements, party organizations, interest group patterns and electoral preference...

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear politic...

Italy is firmly in the grip of an austerity programme mandated by the European Union institutions, and executed by an unelected technocrat. This state of affairs is at once the result of the acute and unexpected crisis of the financial and economic integration of the eurozone, and an expression of the failures of the Italian political class. Althou...

Arthur Okun famously argued that “effciency is bought at the cost of inequalities in income and wealth”. Okun's trade-off represents the antithesis to Karl Polanyi's view of the relationship that the more embedded markets are in society, the better the social and economic outcomes they produce. This paper refines both these views. We argue that not...

A well- known, but probably fictitious headline in a London newspaper once read ‘Fog over the Channel, Continent Isolated’. Whether or not such a headline was ever written, it reflects an Anglo- centric view of the world which can still be detected in contemporary British politics. A his-torically documented example is Margaret Thatcher’s claim tha...

This article examines the conditions under which the United States foreign military bases become a contentious political issue in democratic base-hosting countries. Democratic consolidation, and in particular the institutionalization of the party system, reduces the incentives for political elites to mobilize domestic political support in oppositio...

The apparent 'denationalisation' of electoral politics in a number of western democracies, and the decentralising reforms adopted by a number of these democracies in recent years, necessitate a reevaluation of our understanding of the way political parties organise and compete in the electoral arena. The traditional view of party politics and party...

It is well known that Italy and the UK belong to two very different welfare regime ‘families’: the former a classically ‘Bismarckian’ system of social protection, the latter with ‘Beveridgean’ social security arrangements. Moreover, the policymaking context is also very different in the two cases: Italy has a degree of corporatist policy-making and...

This article addresses the relationship between political decentralization and the organization of political parties in Great Britain and Spain, focusing on the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, respectively. It assesses two rival accounts of this relationship: Caramani’s ‘nationalization of politics’ thesis and Chhibber and Kollman’s rational...

Spain has a PR system that has not been particularly proportional. The main reason is that its 50 historic provinces (dating from 1833) were chosen as the electoral districts, and these provinces took no account of subsequent demographic changes. Thus, many of Spain's districts are too small to achieve even reasonable proportionality, and the syste...

This article seeks to disentangle which features of government intervention are linked to corruption and which are not, by distinguishing between the government roles of regulator, entrepreneur, and consumer. It finds that the degree of regulation of private business activity is the strongest predictor of corruption, and that high levels of public...

The article addresses how Britain's major statewide political parties—Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats—adapted to political devolution in Scotland and Wales. It explores party organization, programs, and policymaking. It argues that the Labour Party experienced the most territorial intraparty conflict but fairly rapidly achieved...

The European debate on the challenges of globalisation often degenerates into a contest between a purportedly ‘Anglo-American’ model of liberalised markets lacking a social dimension, and an inflexible ‘European Social Model’ of generous welfare provision but slow growth and high unemployment. We argue in this article that this is a false choice. D...

For the parties of the center-left, 2005 was a year of significant progress toward the objective of wresting the government from Berlusconi’s center- right coalition. It began with Romano Prodi’s initially uncertain return to the Italian political stage after his “exile” in Brussels as president of the European Commission, and familiar divisions—en...

Shows that the politics of democratic societies is moving towards a presidentialized working mode, even in the absence of formal institutional changes. These developments can be explained by a combination of long-term structural changes in modern politics and societies’ contingent factors that fluctuate over time. While these contingent, short-term...

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an 'Americanization' of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an 'American' direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred ty...

This article presents some theoretical contours for the study of party finance and its consequences. Two broad issues are explored. First, the article develops an account of changes in patterns of party finance, and in particular the move away from the ‘mass party’ model of funding towards ‘elite party’ and ‘cartel party’ models. Party finance is c...

Abstract This article assesses the double strategic dilemma facing ,the social democratic parties of the recent period. First, it examines the economic policy options available to social democratic parties under globalization and argues that rather than facing a stark choice between neo-liberal reformand policy stagnation, the West European left ca...

Electoral politics in the larger Western democracies seems to be becoming increasingly `denationalized': non-statewide political parties have grown in strength, and demands for decentralization have led to major institutional changes in large unitary states in recent years. As a result, the conventional view of party politics as essentially taking...

Several of the world's leading scholars present critical analyses (both conceptual and empirical) of important substantive themes on political parties in contemporary democracies. They critically re-examine the classic concepts and typologies that have guided research in this field over the past decades, and explore new challenges faced by parties...

This 2001 book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries. Through the historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden and Greece, England and Spain, France and Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, the authors study both the 'supply-side' - the institutional context in which party leader...

Primary elections and membership ballots are becoming more common as a means of selecting candidates in European parties. This article assesses the likely implications of these changes for party cohesion by examining the American experience of primaries and contrasting US candidate selection with the membership ballots and primaries recently adopte...

It is often argued that clientelism is a key feature of electoral mobilisation in southern European democracies. This article examines the evidence for clientelism in the Spanish case, assessing the recruitment, redistributive strategies and electoral performance of governing parties in the 1977–96 period. It finds little evidence of extensive clie...

Discussion of new forms of party organisation have largely focused on the ways in which institutionalised parties have adapted to pressures towards ‘catch-all’ or ‘electoralprofessional’ behaviour. This article examines the ways in which new parties respond to these pressures. A model of the ‘party as business firm’ is generated from rational choic...

Many prominent cases of political corruption in Western European democracies have involved political parties, yet the link between theories of political parties and theories of political corruption has not been explored. This article seeks to examine this link from the perspective of economic theories of democracy. It is argued that the economic mo...

El objetivo de este papel es analizar en términos comparados las estrategias multi-nivel de los Partidos de Ámbito no Estatal (PANE) y su impacto en los sistemas de partidos y la gobernabilidad de España y el Reino Unido. Ambos casos proporcionan información para examinar la validez de algunos de los trabajos más relevantes (Caramani, 2004; Chhibbe...

• Background This project has as its starting point a critique o f the existing literature on decentralization and territorial politics. Much pre vious research on the 'territorial question' in contemporary European states has tende d to focus on the formal changes to the administration structure of the state inhere nt in decentralization reforms,...

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Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía El abrupto colapso del UCD, partido que gobernó España durante el período crucial de la transición a la democracia, es uno de los más interesantes eventos en la historia de los partidos políticos europeos. Este libro desarrolla un marco teórico para el estudio de la institucionalización del partido y explora las...