How Political Parties Respond: Interest Aggregation Revisited

How Political Parties Respond focuses specifically on the question of interest aggregation. Do parties today perform that function? If so, how? If not, in what different ways do they seek to show themselves responsive to the electorate?

This fascinating book studies these questions with reference to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. A chapter on Russia demonstrates how newly powerful private interest groups and modern techniques of persuasion can work together to prevent effective party response to popular interests in systems where the authoritarian tradition remains strong.

Kay Lawson is Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University, and General Editor of the International Political Science Review. Her research and publications have focussed on the comparative study of political parties, including Political Parties and Democracy in the United States, The Comparative Study of Political Parties, Political Parties and Linkage (co-edited), When Parties Fail (co-edited), How Political Parties Work (editor), and Cleavages, Parties and Voters (co-edited). She is also the author of The Human Polity, now in its fifth edition. She is the 2003 recipient of the Eldersveld Award (for a lifetime of outstanding scholarly and professional contributions to the study of parties and political organizations).
Thomas Poguntke is Professor of Political Science at SPIRE, Keele University, UK and Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. He is author of Parteiorganisation im Wandel: Gesellschaftliche Verankerung und organisatorische Anpassung im Europäischen Vergleich (Westdeutscher Verlag 2000), Alternative Politics: The German Green Party, (Edinburgh University Press 1993) and co-editor of several volumes politics and parties in western democracies. His main research interests are political parties and the comparative analysis of democratic regimes.