Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL2104: Party Politics and Democracy

This module descriptor refers to the 2021/2 academic year.

Module Aims

The aims of this module are to provide you with a detailed examination of the place of parties in representative democracies. A key emphasis of the module will be to enrich your understanding of the role of political parties both in the historical development of representative democracy and in its contemporary crises, using a range of theoretical approaches and empirical studies. Through taking this course and fully participating you will leave with a grasp of key debates in party studies and theories of partisanship and knowledge of historical and contemporary trends in the relationship between democracy and party politics.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
This module's assessment will evaluate your achievement of the ILOs listed here – you will see reference to these ILO numbers in the details of the assessment for this module.
On successfully completing the programme you will be able to:
Module-Specific Skills	1. Demonstrate good knowledge of the role of partisan agency in the historical development of representative democracy and in its contemporary crises. 2. Assess the democratic merits of party strategies in Europe and the US from a range of theoretical perspective.
Discipline-Specific Skills	3. Demonstrate an understanding of contemporary debates in the field of party studies. 4. Display knowledge of diverse approaches to the democratic functions of political parties and a capacity to apply these theoretical tools to empirical case studies.
Personal and Key Skills	5. Conduct independent research and exercise critical reasoning in weighing academic arguments 6. Demonstrate analytical capacity and structure in written and oral expression

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics.

The first half of the module will be chronological, and provide an insight into the progressive institutionalisation of political parties in Western Europe and the United States, from the mid-19th century to post-World War Two. The first sessions will focus on political parties in early modern thought, and consider the arguments that rose both against and in favour of political parties by political thinkers and actors in the 18th and early 19th century. The module will then examine topics such as the interaction between the birth of mass parties and the extension of the voting suffrage; the role of political parties in the development of political cleavages, and the totalitarian turn of partisanship in the inter-war period.

The second part of this module will be thematical, and investigate different aspects of the evolution of party politics since the end of the Second World War. It will interrogate the relevance of political parties for contemporary democracy and critically examine the proposition that they have become obsolete. Themes studied in this second part will include:

The gradual erosion of the mass party as an organizational form
The rise of populist parties in Europe
The role of transnational partisanship in the EU
The progressive polarization of American politics.

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	22	11 x 2 hour per week seminars including small group work, presentations, and class discussion.
Guided Independent Study	50	Reading
Guided Independent Study	30	Preparation and completion of examination
Guided independent study	13	Presentation preparation
Guided Independent Study	35	Essay writing

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Basic reading:

Hofstadter, Richard (1969), The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840, Berkeley: University of California Press

Katz, Richard S., and William J. Crotty, eds. 2006. Handbook of party politics. London: SAGE.

Mair, Peter. 2013. Ruling the Void, The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Muirhead, Russell (2014) The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Rokkan, Stein, and Seymour Martin Lipset (1967) Party systems and voter alignments: cross-national perspectives, New York: Free Press.

Rosenblum, Nancy (2008), On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship, Princeton: PUP

Sartori, Giovanni (1976), Parties and Party Systems, Cambridge: CUP

Schattschneider, Elmer Eric. 2009 [1942]. Party government, American government in action series. New Brunswick: Transaction publishers.

White, Jonathan, and Léa Ypi (2016) The meaning of partisanship, Oxford: Oxford University Press.