This book provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the roles that political parties perform in twenty OECD nations. It finds that parties continue to exercise their traditional roles in organizing elections and structuring the government process, but that they are losing the allegiance of a public that is increasingly non-partisan and sceptical about political parties as institutions. These findings lead to a discussion about the changing nature of representative democracy as these nations enter the 21st Century.
Russell J. Dalton is Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. He has received a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Mannheim, a Barbra Streisand Center fellowship, German Marshall Research Fellowship and a POSCO Fellowship at the East/West Center. His scholarly interests include comparative political behavior, political parties, social movements, and empirical democratic theory.