Overview

The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.

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9780198825081

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This work provides a comprehensive foundation for understanding current conceptualizations of representation in liberal democracies. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. * R. V. Labaree, University of Southern California, CHOICE *

Author Information

Robert Rohrschneider is Sir Robert Worcester Distinguished Professor of International Public Opinion and Survey Research at the University of Kansas. He teaches Comparative Politics and his research focuses on Comparative Public Opinion, Political Parties, Democratic Representation in Western and Central-Eastern Europe. Jacques Thomassen is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He is member and former secretary general of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Mannheim, the Australian National University, and the European University Institute. He published widely on issues of political representation, electoral behaviour, democracy, and legitimacy. He was a founding member of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and participated in many other projects of comparative political research. Among his publications are Elections and Democracy: Representation and Accountability OUP 2014; Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis: Explaining trends and cross-national differences in established democracies OUP 2017.

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