Politics and Society in Western Europe is a comprehensive introduction for students of West European politics and of comparative politics. This new edition has been extensively revised and updated to meet with the new needs of undergraduate students as they come to terms with a changing social and political landscape in Europe. This textbook provides a full analysis of the political systems of 18 Western European countries, their political parties, elections, and party systems, as well as the structures of government at local, regional, national and European Union levels. Throughout the book, key theoretical ideas are accessibly introduced and examined against the very latest empirical data on civil society and the state.

Political participation is a central component in all democratic systems, since citizen involvement is a prerequisite for assuring the lehitimacy of the system. Research on political participation has long acknowledged that this involvement cannot be restricted to elections. Nonetheless, the different institutional systems found in the established democracies create different possibilities and axpectations for citizen engagement beyond the vote. This goes not only for how much involvement is expected, but also for the ways in which citizens should be involved in political matters. In this study, the author examines how the institutional context affects various aspects of political participation in a comparative anallysis of 18 established European democracies. The aspects analysed include the dimensionality of participation, country-level differences in the rates of participation, the characteristics of the participants, and the institutional incentives for participation. The results suggest that the institutional context affects key aspects of political participation. However, the precise impact frequently runs counter to the theoretical expectations. The study hereby challenges some of the central theoretical assumptions of political science for how institutional openness affects patterns of political participation.

This unique study presents the results of a cross-national analysis of citizenship and participation among citizens in twelve European democracies. Research on the future and quality of contemporary democracy is usually restricted to focus either on political participation, on particular aspects of citizenship, or on social activities, exclusively. This new book offers the first empirical investigation of the relationships both between social and political involvement, and between ‘small-scale’ and ‘large-scale’ democracies. Citizenship and Involvement in European Democracies offers representative samples of the populations in a selection of European countries between 2000-2002, including: Denmark, Germany (East and West), Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The leading contributors provide new theoretical insights and offer a broad conceptualization of citizenship, stimulating the ongoing discussions about the problems and challenges of democratic political systems. This book has a companion volume entitled Social Capital and Associations in European Democracies edited by William A. Maloney and Sigrid Roßteutscher (Routledge, 2006). Both volumes will be of great interest to students and researchers of European politics, comparative politics and sociology.

This volume begins where the first Döring book of 1995 finished by considering what effects the rules had on legislative output during the same period. It addresses four distinct yet complementary research topics: - the connection between a number of veto players and law production in West European parliamentary democracies - the impact of closed versus open rules - the effects of committee structure and organization on the degree of conflict or consensus on the procedure of passing legislation - the importance of agenda setting and agenda control for the prevention of cycling across issues and the distribution of particular benefits of shifting and transient majorities. Fundamental to this volume is the ability of the project group to fashion an original data set. As a consequence, this volume is able to ascertain the extent to which parliamentary procedures contributed to shaping policy output in this field during the 1980s.

A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.