Book Review: Comparative Politics: State Formation, Parties and Democracy: Studies in Comparative European Politics

Date01 May 2013
DOI10.1111/1478-9302.12016_59
AuthorPaolo Morisi
Published date01 May 2013
Subject MatterBook Review
These shortcomings notwithstanding, the book is rich
in detail and approachable for both academics and
non-academics alike. Above all, the book successfully
puts ‘quiet politics’ theory at the centre of the corpo-
rate governance literature and, from a broader theoreti-
cal perspective, further f‌ine-tunes the ‘varieties of
capitalism’ and ‘institutional change’ literature. In this
regard, it will serve as a particularly valuable reference
among students of political institutions, political
economy and business.
Notes
1 Tiberghien, Y. (2007) Entrepreneurial States:Refor ming Cor-
porate Governance in France, Japan, and Korea. Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press.
2 Gourevitch, P. A. and Shinn, J. (2005) Political Power and
Corporate Control:The New Global Politics of Corporate Gov-
ernance. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
3 Hall, P.A. (2003) ‘Aligning Ontology and Methodology in
Comparative Research’, in J. Mahoney and D. Rue-
schemeyer (eds), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social
Sciences, p. 374.
Jaemin Shim
(University of Oxford)
State Formation, Parties and Democracy:
Studies in Comparative European Politics by
Hans Daalder. Colchester: ECPR Press, 2011.
303pp., £34.00, ISBN 9781907301179
Hans Daalder taught political science at Leiden Uni-
versity and was one of the founders of the European
Consortium of Political Research and of post-Second
World War comparative politics. This volume collects
Daalder’s major articles on comparative politics, with a
particular emphasis on processes of democratisation and
the development of parties and party systems. Daalder
was one of the f‌irst political scientists to adopt the
comparative method to analyse party systems and
evaluate their performance. His approach to compara-
tive analysis was empirical as well as historical. He
would use data to test a hypothesis and tease out
explanatory variables. But he would also adopt the
‘thick description’ approach which would typically
involve delving into the history of national case studies.
With this approach Daalder not only described and
explained the evolution of modern party systems but
also provided the reader with a detailed historical
account of the various cases.
Most of the articles cover three major themes: f‌irst,
the different paths towards state formation. In one of
his most well-known and cited articles,‘Parties, Elites,
and Political Developments in Western Europe’,
Daalder demonstrates how political parties can be key
agents in the development of modern, homogeneous,
political systems. He compares the British to the
French political system and shows how parties have
been crucial agents of nation building in the United
Kingdom, while they have been far less successful in
France. Daalder contrasts British mass parties to
France’s cadre type to explain how the former became
genuine brokers linking the centre to the periphery.
Second, Daalder evaluates how patterns of pre-
democratic political elite settings inf‌luenced the devel-
opment of party systems. One of his main arguments is
that countries that developed to mass democracy in a
slow and gradual fashion have typically been more
successful than those that faced the twin crisis of
national integration and political participation at the
same time, such as Germany and Italy. Third, he dis-
cusses the rise and merits of consociational democracy.
In a review article on smaller European democracies
Daalder explains how thanks to political institutional
engineering they have been able to achieve political
stability despite very diff‌icult social and cultural con-
ditions. Lastly, in the preface Peter Mair contrasts Daal-
der’s scholarly generation to today’s, arguing that
today’s students of political science are exclusively
method driven and hence tend to produce works of a
much more limited quality than those of Daalder’s
generation.
Paolo Morisi
(Independent Scholar)
Semi-presidentialism and Democracy by Robert
Elgie,Sophia Moestrup and Yu-Shan Wu (eds).
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 296pp., £60.00,
ISBN 9780230242920
Robert Elgie has long been a proponent in the f‌ield of
semi-presidentialism and has produced many scholarly
books and articles on the subject. His latest contribu-
tion is Semi-presidentialism and Democracy, edited with
Sophia Moestrup and Yu-ShanWu, both of whom he
has collaborated with before. Following up on earlier
works including those on semi-presidentialism in
Western Europe, Eastern Europe and outside Europe,
BOOK REVIEWS 263
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)

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