Coping with Cornucopia: The Parties Literature in the New Millennium

A review essay on books by (1) James F. Adams, Samuel Merrill III & Bernard Grofman, A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); (2) Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860-1980: The Class Cleavage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); (3) Ingrid Van Biezen, Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); (4) Pradeep K. Chhibber & Ken Kollman, The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); (5) Henry E. Hale, Why Not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Richard S. Katz & William Crotty [Eds], Handbook of Party Politics (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006); (7) Steven Levitsky, Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); (8) Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) & (9) Alan Ware, The American Direct Primary: Party Institutionalization and Transformation in the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).