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The Party Systems of the Established Liberal Democracies in the 1990s: Is this a Decade of Transformation?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Alan Ware
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Extract

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1990s ABOUT ONE THIRD OF the countries which had been governed continuously by liberal democratic regimes since the mid-1950s experienced major electoral upheavals at a general election. In the case of eight countries an argument could be made that electoral politics was not as it had been, and that the party systems were now experiencing problems that were quite different in scale from those with which they had contended during the previous forty years. The countries concerned were:

– Sweden, where the 1991 general election produced a major decline in the share of the vote (5.5 per cent of the total) for the governing Social Democrats; this was the largest change in its vote share between consecutive elections since 1944.

Type
Research Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1995 , pp. 312 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1995

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References

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