Description
This book represents the first comprehensive study of the evolution of parties and party systems in all nine democratic European states with less than one million inhabitants.
As small political units have for long been considered to be most conducive to stable democracy, this volume analyses the actual role of political parties and partisan competition in the operation of modern democracy in those European microstates. Drawing on the crucial contribution of leading country experts in the field, it provides rich, systematic contextualized knowledge on these lesser-known cases. It further contributes to the mainstreaming of small state research in social science studies by comparing the experience of party politics in European microstates with that of larger countries in the same region of the world.
This volume will be of key interest to scholars and students of party systems and political parties, elections and democracy, small states, European politics and more broadly of comparative politics.
Table of Contents
Party Politics in European Microstates: One Step towards Mainstreaming
Patrick Dumont
1 San Marino’s Increasing Instability: Politics in the Oldest, Smallest Party Democracy in the World
Fernando Casal Bértoa
2 Party Politics in the Principality of Liechtenstein
Wouter Veenendaal
3 Monaco’s Political System: National Particularities and Foreign Influences
Félicitas Guillot
4 The Evolution of Andorra’s Party System: From Parties of ‘Notables’ to a Predominant-Party System
Juli F. Minoves
5 A Political Party System in Flux: Iceland’s Political Culture and Smallness
Baldur Thorhallsson and Ólafur Th. Harðarson
6 Malta: Party Politics in a Small Island State
Marcello Carammia and Roderick Pace
7 Party Politics in Luxembourg: Stable, Consensual and Pragmatic
Patrick Dumont, Raphaël Kies and Dan Schmit
8 Party Politics in Montenegro: In the Shadow of the Statehood Issue
Ivan Vuković and Nemanja Batrićević
9 Nationalism, Clientelism and Anti-politics: Party Politics in the Republic of Cyprus
Direnç Kanol and George Pirishis
Conclusion: Party Politics in European Microstates: Similar but Different
Fernando Casal Bértoa
