Richard Gunther

• Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University

The findings reported in this monograph are based upon a broad-based, multi-method analysis of Spanish politics and society, including five national surveys conducted over nearly three decades, and many in-depth qualitative interviews with a “panel” of respondents who had been interviewed six years earlier. With these rich data resources, we are ab...

"Voting in Old and New Democracies" examines voting behavior and its determinants based on 26 surveys from 18 countries on five continents between 1992 and 2008. It systematically analyzes the impact on voting choice of factors rooted in the currently dominant approaches to the study of electoral behavior, but adds to this analysis factors introduc...

Embora a literatura específica já inclua um grande número de tipologias de partidos, é cada vez mais difícil dar conta da grande diversidade de tipos de partido político surgidos em todo o mundo nas últimas décadas, especialmente porque a maioria das tipologias baseou-se em partidos da Europa Ocidental, já existentes entre o final do século XIX e a...

This book presents the results of systematic comparative analyses of electoral behaviour and support for democracy in thirteen countries on four continents. It is based on national election surveys held in 'old' and 'new' democracies in Europe (Germany, Britain, Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Bulgaria), North and South America (the United Stat...

This chapter discusses the central focus of this book, the nature of intermediation in a variety of democratic systems, and the implications of differing patterns of intermediation for the nature of politics and the quality of democracy in the countries in the study. It sheds light on the attitudinal factors of the democratic systems in Southern an...

This concluding chapter summarizes the principal findings of this book, puts them into a broader perspective, and examines their uses and limitations. The chapter answers the basic questions regarding the relationship between political intermediation and democracy. The findings about fundamental orientations towards democracy and the impact of the...

Our dear friend and respected colleague Giacomo Sani died on Sunday, June 20, 2010, in Milan, Italy, at the age of 78. He is survived by his wife, Marina Dotti, his children, Giulia and Laura, and two grandchildren.

This chapter presents an overview of the central theme of the book-the overcoming of "Southern European exceptionalism" and approximation over the past four decades of state capacities and public policies typical of other West European democracies-which the chapter hypothesizes is in large measure a product of the interaction among three forces, de...

Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession Edited by Hans Daalder

Southern Europe's historic "exceptionalism" has been replaced by a convergence with Western Europe in several important aspects of public policy: inadequate and regressive taxation systems have been reformed; aggregate levels of spending on social programs have greatly increased; a distant and repressive state has given way to democratic accountabi...

While the anchoring or encapsulation of the vote in social cleavages can serve as an important source of electoral stability in party systems, a simple determinist socioeconomic model is inadequate in explaining varying levels of interbloc volatility. An explanation of electoral volatility must also take into consideration the role played by politi...

Résumé Cet article examine sur trois décennies, la nature, l’évolution et les conséquences des attitudes antipartis des citoyens espagnols, portugais, italiens, grecs. Les auteurs reviennent sur le problème du désengagement politique dans une perspective se voulant plus mesurée et nuancée que les productions récentes en science politique. À l’aide...

Cet article examine sur trois decennies, la nature, l’evolution et les consequences des attitudes antipartis des citoyens espagnols, portugais, italiens, grecs. Les auteurs reviennent sur le probleme du desengagement politique dans une perspective se voulant plus mesuree et nuancee que les productions recentes en science politique. A l’aide de donn...

Não há um consenso claro sobre se as atitudes de apoio à democracia, de um lado, e a cidadania democrática, de outro, constituem um único domínio atitudinal, ou se são empiricamente distintas uma da outra. Em estudos empíricos de atitudes e comportamentos na Bulgária, Chile, Grécia, Hong Kong, Hungria, Itália, Espanha e Uruguai, encontramos provas...

ABSTRACT While the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most,typologies were based upon,West European,parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through,mid-twentieth centuries...

Este artículo explora las actitudes antipartidistas de los ciudadanos, un supuesto rasgo de las democracias occidentales tan frecuentemente aducido como escasamente estudiado. En el análisis empírico de cuatro países del sur de Europa hemos encontrado que las orientaciones antipartidistas presentan dos dimensiones. Una de ellas, a la que hemos llam...

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 book is one in a series (Comparative Politics) for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. After an introduction, it has 11 contributions from leading scholars in the field, which present a critical overview of much of the recent literature on political parties, and...

This book is one in a series (Comparative Politics) for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. After an introduction, it has 11 contributions from leading scholars in the field, which present a critical overview of much of the recent literature on political parties, and...

This book is one in a series (Comparative Politics) for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. After an introduction, it has 11 contributions from leading scholars in the field, which present a critical overview of much of the recent literature on political parties, and...

PDF Can be downloaded at https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/6894

This book presents a systematic overview and assessment of the impacts of politics on the media, and of the media on politics, in authoritarian, transitional and democratic regimes in Russia, Spain, Hungary, Chile, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Its analysis of the interactions between macro- and micro...

This book presents a systematic overview and assessment of the impacts of politics on the media, and of the media on politics, in authoritarian, transitional and democratic regimes in Russia, Spain, Hungary, Chile, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Its analysis of the interactions between macro- and micro...

This book presents a systematic overview and assessment of the impacts of politics on the media, and of the media on politics, in authoritarian, transitional and democratic regimes in Russia, Spain, Hungary, Chile, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Its analysis of the interactions between macro- and micro...

Scholarly interest in democratic transitions has gradually given way to research into the politics of democratic consolidation, broadly understood as social acceptance of the democratic rules of the game. Studies of democratic consolidation are bifurcated into aggregate and disaggregate conceptualizations of democratic consolidation. The disaggrega...

A partir de l'etude du cas espagnol, trois attitudes fondamentales vis-a-vis de la democratie sont presentees ici. Sur la base d'indicateurs empiriques tires de nombreuses enquetes, il etablit une distinction, d'une part, entre la legitimite democratique et le mecontentement politique et, d'autre part, entre celui-ci (qui inclut l'indicateur classi...

Este artículo examina las principales actitudes hacia la democracia en España durante las dos últimas décadas. Se han seleccionado numerosos indicadores empíricos para diferenciar tres facetas que suelen considerarse indistintamente, y por lo tanto confundirse de forma sistemática: la legitimidad democrática, el descontento político y la desafecció...

This article examines changes in perceptions of democracy in Spain over the last two decades. A variety of empirical indicators gleaned from numerous surveys are used to distinguish between democratic legitimacy and political discontent, as well as between this (which includes the well-known indicator of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works...

Does political regime matter? Parallel analyses of Spanish public expenditure and taxation policies under the authoritarian Franco regime and in the current democracy, as well as of decision-making processes under both regimes, based upon extensive in-depth interviews with relevant government officials from 1974 to 1996, indicate that political reg...

Journal of Democracy 7.4 (1996) 151-159 Now that the "third wave" of democratization has apparently ended, the research agenda for many social scientists logically shifts from the processes through which new democratic regimes come into being to a greater concern with the viability and prospects for long-term survival of those new regimes, as well...

The global process of political democratization has posed a major theoretical challenge to comparative scholarship. Although many new approaches to the study of political democracy have emerged in response to this challenge, comparativists remain very far from agreeing upon a set of models capable of providing alternatives to the outdated literatur...

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 author...

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 author...

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 author...

Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the @'mechanical@' effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the "distal" effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct...

En este estudio se analiza la influencia de las leyes electorales en los sistemas de partidos, utilizando datos agregados, de encuesta y de entrevistas en profundidad, recogidos en España en las dos últimas décadas. El "efecto mecánico" de la ley electoral española ha resultado ser tan fuerte como el de muchos sistemas de distrito uninominal. Prese...

The four Southern European democracies ‐ Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece ‐ have a number of important cultural, social, economic, and historical characteristics in common, and their political systems are also often seen as similar, representing a ‘Mediterranean model of democracy’. However, when these four democratic regimes are compared with the...

The constituent process that took place in Spain following the death of Francisco Franco involved nothing less than the creation of an entirely new political regime. The social and institutional reforms which resulted are among the most far-reaching ever attempted in a modern industrialised society. The success of those efforts was not to be taken...

Abstract The four Southern European democracies ,reveal greatly differing patterns of electoral volatility: the ,Spanish party system underwent ,a profound ,restructuring as a ,result of the "electoral earthquake" of 1982, but has become outstandingly stable since then; the Italian party system had been impressively stable from the 1950s until 1992...

This course is intended to provide a broad overview of the various kinds of data, methods and approaches found in Comparative Politics. In light of the field's enormously broad array of subject matters and its heterodoxy, the sub-title for this course is "Different Strokes for Different Folks." It central focus derives from the premise that there i...