Alan J. Ware - Böcker

This book is a major analysis of the role of political parties in the development and promotion of democracy. Alan Ware offers an original discussion of an area of political life which has remained surprisingly under-examined – the impact of parties on democratic life.Ware's work successfully combines a comparative study of parties with a comprehensive discussion of democratic theory. He examines the role of parties in one-party political systems, focussing on the issue of whether there can be democracy in such systems. One-party systems are then contrasted with those found in representative democracies. Ware offers a highly detailed analysis of the development, evolution and structure of political parties in the West, exploring such issues as the nature of voter-choice in two-party and multi-party systems, and who exactly controls the political system – the voter or the parties, the political elite or the grass-roots activists? Finally, Ware looks at the internal operations of political parties and the fate of attempts to democratize them. He draws extensive conclusions about the proper place of parties and party systems in democratic theory.Citizens, Parties and the State will be welcomed by second and third-year students and researchers in politics, sociology, current affairs and international politics.

This book is about the many organizations in Britain and the United States which are neither legally part of the state nor permitted to distribute any profits they earn. These ‘intermediate organizations' include charities, churches, famine relief agencies, non-state universities, credit unions and social clubs.In a unique study of this area of the British and American economy, Alan Ware provides a rigorously analytical and historical account of the relationship of intermediate organizations to both the state and the ‘for profit' sector. Among other issues, the author considers the disappearance of nineteenth century working class ‘mutual' organizations, the growth of profit-making activities by non-profit distributing bodies and the growth and change in voluntarism. He argues that the boundaries between intermediate organizations and the other two ‘sectors' are becoming more blurred in a variety of ways and that intermediate organizations do not constitute a separate ‘sector' of society.The book also examines the problems of regulating such organizations and explains the consequences of the British and American practice of having relatively little state intervention in the affairs of such organizations. Finally the author discusses the activities of these organizations in relation to pluralist accounts of the working of liberal democratic states.

This book addresses the concept of need and how needs can be, and are, met in western societies. Different models of welfare provision are examined both in theoretical terms and through two case studies: of models of pension provision and of the connection between the satisfaction of needs and electoral success for governments. This timely study makes an important contribution to the understanding of welfare and politics in advanced industrial western states.