Political Parties and Party Systems (2020)

The course provides the students with basic orientation in the theory of political parties and party systems. First, the course focuses on political parties as individual institutions, with specific structure and hierarchy and involved in various processes. Following lectures focuses on explaining the emergence and formation of political parties in Europe in relation to various cleavages (social conflicts) with special attention to the transformation of these cleavages in the 20th and 21st century. Besides this, the course aims at introduction to diverse typologies of political parties as well was to typologies of party systems.