Comparative Party Politics

Learning Outcomes

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Understand how various phenomena in party politics can be studied empirically in a systematic way

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Understand the changing role of political parties in contemporary democracies
• Show understanding of the theories explaining the key aspects of party politics, such as internal party organization and party competition

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Demonstrate understanding of core concepts relevant to party politics in established democracies in Western Europe
• Summarise the main empirical facts about parties and party systems in Europe

This course considers some of the seminal contributions to modern scholarship in the field of party politics. This course takes an explicitly comparative approach and doesn't focus on certain parties/countries. Topics to be covered include:

1. Introduction: Why parties?

2. The ‘Golden Age’ of Political Parties

3. Party Models

4. Party Government

5. Parties and Party Systems

6. Party Families

7. Party Organization

8. Parties beyond the state

9. Parties and the crisis of responsiveness

10. Parties today: death or decline?

Teaching and learning methods

2 hours of lectures per week. All will be recorded and posted on Blackboard. Lectures will be delivered either face to face or online only depending upon University and Public Health England Guidance at the time. Total of 24 hours of lectures (2 hours per week X 12 weeks) per module.

Weekly student participation in online discussion boards. 1 hour per week delivered asynchronously. (1 hour X 12 weeks)

Resources & Reading list

General Resources

Databases. Databases: Comparative Political Data Set, 1960-2017. http://www.cpds-data.org/index.php/data European Representative Democracy (ERD). http://www.erdda.se/index.php/projects/erd/data-archive. Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). http://chesdata.eu Manifesto Project Database (MARPOR) https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/ Political Party Database (PPDB).https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/0NM7KZ&version=1.0

Journal Articles. Articles from journals such as Party Politics, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science.

Textbooks

Dalton, Russell J., Farrell, David M. and McAllister, I. (2011). Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How Parties Organize Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dalton, Russell J. and Wattenberg, Martin P. (2002). Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External