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

Since the turn of the 1980–90s the Swedish society has undergone fundamental changes. It has altered the vector of the socioeconomic development. The social democrats have lost their position as the dominant party. They changed the course of the governmental policy from social-state to liberal one that was taken over and strengthened by the government of center-right parties after their victory in the 2006 and 2010 general elections. The social democrats have found themselves in the unprecedented since 1917 long opposition. All of this means that, despite keeping predominance of the institutional-redistributive principle of social policy, the former model of societal development has in essence consigned to history.

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.

Austria was occupied at the end of World War II by the four Allies, but in contrast to Germany the four powers left in 1955—the condition being its declaration of permanent neutrality, on which the Soviet Union had insisted.In the first half of the 1950s, relations with the new-founded European Coal and Steel Community were being discussed in Austria, because the organization encompassed Austria’s two most important trading partners at that time, West Germany and Italy. But after the uprising in October-November 1956 in neighboring Hungary, Austria started to stress more its neutrality, excluding European Economic Community (EEC) membership. Instead, it joined other European countries to create a less integrated economic entity, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960.Not until the mid-1980s did debate about membership in the now European Community (EC) start again. Economic problems and a narrower interpretation of neutrality led to Austria’s application for EC (later European Union) membership in July 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the application of other EFTA countries, Austria finally acceded to the EU on January 1, 1995 (along with Finland and Sweden). The political system and its economy adjusted relatively smoothly to the challenges of EU membership; the “social partnership,” while losing some of its power, could maintain its influence on Austrian politics. Eastern enlargement of the EU brought further economic advantages for Austria.As one of the smaller EU countries and a non-NATO member, Austria has a somewhat unique position in the EU. Environmental policy and supporting EU membership of the Balkan countries are among the important “niches” for Austrian EU activities. But the country has no close partners in the EU, because it is not participating in the “Visegrad” cooperation of the other Central European EU members. This difficulty clearly showed during the “sanctions” period of the EU-14 against the new Austrian government in 2000.