Party Politics (by Vít Hloušek, Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Only a few scholars would question the thesis concerning the recent increasing importance of the key members of the executive in democracies, a phenomenon related to the centralization of both executive power and the organization of political parties. Many scholars would, however, oppose or dispute the concept of the ‘presidentialization’ of politics that has been developed since the early 1990s to capture such a development. The recent volume edited by Gianluca Passarelli sheds new light on the concept and its analytical potential to unravel the processes of transformation of the organizational patterns of contemporary political parties. The volume covers the conceptual debate as well as 11 country studies. The opening chapter, written by the editor, offers an interesting conceptual introduction which not only provides the framework for the country studies but, above all, increases the analytical potential of the very concept of party presidentialization. Here the full article in PDF