ABSTRACT
Having looked at contextual, country and party-specific factors, this book offers a theoretical framework to explain party policy choices. In contemporary political science the ‘rational’ exchange and ‘institutional’ approaches are most frequently used to explain political events. While the ‘rational’ exchange approach focuses on actors behaving rationally by choosing among ‘ranked’ choices, the institutional approach incorporates aspects of organizational theory as well as sociology to emphasize how institutions structure political life and how institutional choices shape actors’ ideas, attitudes and even their preferences.8
