An illuminating investigation into why some parties evolve with their times while others fall behind.

Around the world, established political parties face mounting pressures: insurgents on the Left and Right, altered media environments, new policy challenges, and the erosion of traditional strongholds, to name just a few. Yet parties have differed enormously in their ability to move with the times and update their offers to voters. This variation matters. While adaptation does not guarantee a party’s electoral success, the failure to modernize can spell its decline, even collapse, and create openings for radical and populist parties that may threaten the future of liberal democracy.

Parties under Pressure examines why some parties adapt meaningfully to social, economic, and political transformations while others flounder, focusing especially on the fate of Western Europe’s Christian democratic parties. Matthias Dilling reveals the under-appreciated importance of party factions. While very high levels of factionalism are counter-productive and create paralysis, more moderate levels of factionalism help parties to adapt by giving visibility to fresh groups and ideas. Dilling draws on extensive archival research in Germany, Italy, and Austria, as well as evidence from France, Japan, and beyond. Taking a comparative-historical approach, Parties under Pressure sheds new light on parties’ varying records of adaptive reforms over more than seventy-five years.

The rise of modern public finance revolutionized political economy. As governments learned to invest tax revenue in the long-term financial resources of the market, they vastly increased their administrative power and gained the ability to use fiscal, monetary, and financial policy to manage their economies. But why did the modern fiscal state emerge in some places and not in others? In approaching this question, Wenkai He compares the paths of three different nations—England, Japan, and China—to discover why some governments developed the tools and institutions of modern public finance, while others, facing similar circumstances, failed to do so.

Focusing on three key periods of institutional development—the decades after the English Civil Wars, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion—He demonstrates how each event precipitated a collapse of the existing institutions of public finance. Facing urgent calls for revenue, each government searched for new ways to make up the shortfall. These experiments took varied forms, from new methods of taxation to new credit arrangements. Yet, while England and Japan learned from their successes and failures how to deploy the tools of modern public finance and equipped themselves to become world powers, China did not. He’s comparative historical analysis isolates the nature of the credit crisis confronting each state as the crucial factor in determining its specific trajectory. This perceptive and persuasive explanation for China’s failure at a critical moment in its history illuminates one of the most important but least understood transformations of the modern world.

Here is a benchmark study of voter attitudes in a Latin American country. This volume is based on extensive survey research conducted during the Venezuelan elections of 1973. The methods employed by Baloyra and Martz to poll an "unpollable" society successfully challenge previously established paradigms.

The authors interviewed a representative sample of over 1,500 voters to determine relationships between class, status, community, context, religion, ideology, and partisanship on the one hand and political attitudes and preferences on the other. They found that the Venezuelan electorate is defined by a series of contradictory tendencies, and they place their conclusions in the context of contemporary political science literature regarding class and party, ideology and party, and inequality and participation.

The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II.

Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.

The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters’ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.

Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

American state and Canadian provincial governments have dealt with rapidly rising auto insurance rates in different ways over the last two decades, a difference many attribute to variances in political pressure exerted by interest groups such as trial attorneys and insurance companies. Edward L. Lascher, Jr., argues that we must consider two additional factors: the importance of politicians’ beliefs about the potential success of various solutions and the role of governmental institutions.

Using case studies from both sides of the border, Lascher shows how different explanations of the problem and different political structures affect insurance reform. In his conclusion, Lascher moves beyond auto insurance to draw implications for regulation and policymaking in other areas.

Comparing national efforts to preserve public lands, William R. Lowry investigates how effectively and under what conditions governments can provide goods for future generations.

Providing intergenerational goods, ranging from balanced budgets to space programs and natural environments, is particularly challenging because most political incentives reward short-term behavior. Lowry examines the effect of institutional structure on the public delivery of these goods. He offers a theoretical framework accounting for both the necessary conditions — public demand, political stability, and official commitment to long-term delivery — and constraining factors — the tensions between public agencies and politicians as well as between different levels of government — that determine the ability of a nation to achieve long-term goals.

In support of this argument, Lowry evaluates data on park systems from more than one hundred countries and provides in-depth case studies of four — he United States, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica — to show how and why the delivery of intergenerational goods can vary. For each of the cases, he reviews background information, discusses constraints on agency behavior, and assesses expansion of the park systems and restoration of natural conditions at specific locations.

This extensive comparative analysis of the preservation of public lands offers new insights into the capability of nations to pursue long-term goals.

Why and how systems of political financing and representation in Europe and North America give outsized influence to the wealthy and undermine democracy, and what we can do about it.

One person, one vote. In theory, everyone in a democracy has equal power to decide elections. But it’s hardly news that, in reality, political outcomes are heavily determined by the logic of one dollar, one vote. We take the political power of money for granted. But does it have to be this way? In The Price of Democracy, Julia Cagé combines economic and historical analysis with political theory to show how profoundly our systems in North America and Europe, from think tanks and the media to election campaigns, are shaped by money. She proposes fundamental reforms to bring democracy back into line with its egalitarian promise.

Cagé shows how different countries have tried to develop legislation to curb the power of private money and to develop public systems to fund campaigns and parties. But these attempts have been incoherent and unsystematic. She demonstrates that it is possible to learn from these experiments in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to design a better system that would increase political participation and trust. This would involve setting a strict cap on private donations and creating a public voucher system to give each voter an equal amount to spend in support of political parties. More radically, Cagé argues that a significant fraction of seats in parliamentary assemblies should be set aside for representatives from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

At a time of widespread political disenchantment, The Price of Democracy is a bracing reminder of the problems we face and an inspirational guide to the potential for reform.