CLEAVAGES, ORGANIZED INTERESTS, AND PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES, GERMANY AND JAPAN

Cleavages;Parties;Organized Interests;USA;Japan;Germany;AFL-CIO;DGB;RENGO;LULAC;TGD;BLL;Political Science

Bauwens, FabianRowe, William T. ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Cleavages;    Parties;    Organized Interests;    USA;    Japan;    Germany;    AFL-CIO;    DGB;    RENGO;    LULAC;    TGD;    BLL;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37946/BAUWENS-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This project focuses on the relationship between cleavages, political parties, and interest groups in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Despite very different political and institutional characteristics – two-party, multi-party, and dominant-party systems; the German neo-corporatist state, the Japanese ;;developmental state,” and the U.S. pluralist limited state – all of them suffer increasingly from problems of disaffection of the electorate with political parties and elections. I explore the question in how far political parties actually represent the demands of cleavage-based constituencies as embodied by extra-electoral organized interests, how this relationship changed over time, and in how far institutional differences in government-interest group embeddedness may account for this. In particular, I am analyzing and comparing time-series data for political parties, union federations and minority organizations, by employing content analysis software in order to process data reaching back as far as five decades. As a theoretical framework I reapply social cleavage theory in a way that both parties and extra-electoral forms of political participation are included. One of the elements that make this project unique, is this approach that permits a comparison of political parties and extra-electoral political organizations within the same theoretical and methodological framework. This framework enables me to explore the changing relationship between the programmatic language of party manifestos and organized interests’ programmatic texts. In addition to case specific insights my project will not only provide a contribution to theory on the relationship between political cleavages, parties, and organized interests, but it will also yield a basis for recommendations on how to make political parties more responsive to the demands of cleavage-based organized interests. This project may be particularly useful for fledgling democracies in the early stages of state building, and studies focused on the interaction between political parties and interest group organizations.