Academic literature on the topic 'Political parties – Denmark – 1956-1980'

The party politics of immigration is one of the fastest growing bodies of research within the study of West European politics. Within this literature, an underlying assumption is that immigration has become one of the most salient issues. However, this is rarely documented, let alone explained. Drawing on a new coding of party manifestos in seven West European countries, this article shows that party attention to immigration has grown in all countries since 1980 but only in Denmark has the issue become one of the most salient issues of party politics. We find that the general increase in attention reflects the rising number of immigrants and rise of radical right-wing parties. In terms of the issue becoming a top issue of party politics, a comparative analysis of the politicization of immigration in Denmark and the Netherlands shows that the interest of mainstream right-wing parties and coalition dynamics are the crucial factors.

The article is aimed at studying the Belarusian historiography on the dissolution of the Communist Party of Poland and its constituent part — the Communist Party of Western Belarus in 1938 by a decision of the Executive Committee of the Comintern on suspicion of penetration of enemy agents. On the basis of a wide range of historiographical sources, including archival documents, the author reveals the emergence and transformation of the approaches and critical views of historians of the BSSR on this topic, taking into account the positions of Russian and Polish scholars and the determination of the judgments of the researchers of the 1930s — the first half of the 1950s by the official Soviet version of the validity of the dissolution of the communist parties of Poland and Western Belarus as agents of Piłsudski. The political rehabilitation of the Communist Party of Poland in 1956 contributed to the intensification of the study into the history of the Communist Party of Western Belarus, but there was no significant extension of the topic of dissolution either in 1960–1980 or during the period of the Republic of Belarus. At the same time, the organizational status of the communist organizations in Western Belarus in the 1930s has not been explored, and no attempts have been made to systematically identify the contacts with the Polish police and the Polish security service. The research identifies archival documents of the Communist Party of Western Belarus and Polish state bodies, including the state police, which testify to the unsatisfactory state of the communist organizations, low party discipline, as well as secret contacts of ordinary party members and leading workers with the security service and the Polish police.

Defence date: 22 June 2004
Examining board: Prof. Luisa Passerini, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen ; Prof. Kim Salomon, Lunds Universitet (second supervisor) ; Dr. Detlef Siegfred, Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte, Hamburg ; Prof. Bo Stråth, European University Institute (supervisor)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Long gone are the times when class-based political parties with extensive membership dominated politics. Instead, party politics has become issue-based. Surprisingly few studies have focused on how the issue content of West European party politics has developed over the past decades. Empirically, this books studies party politics in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK from 1980 and onwards. The book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in ‘new politics’ issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various ‘new politics’ issues such as immigration, the environment, and European integration have seen very different trajectories. To explain the development of the individual issues, the book develops a new theoretical model labelled the ‘issue incentive model’ of party system attention. The aim of the model is to explain how much attention issues get throughout the party system, which is labelled ‘the party system agenda’. To explain the development of the party system agenda, one needs to focus on the incentives that individual policy issues offer to large, mainstream parties, i.e. the typical Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, or Conservative/Liberal parties that have dominated West European governments for decades. The core idea of the model is that the incentives that individual policy issues offer to these vote- and office-seeking parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. The issue incentive model builds on and develops a top-down perspective on which the issue content of party politics is determined by the strategic considerations of political parties and their competition with each other.