This guide is meant as a supplement to the much more comprehensive guide, Finding Country Information. For MORE than you get here, use that!
Start out right by getting a quick overview of the politics and players of your country. We have a great database, called CountryWatch., that will assist you in this. In that database use the pulldown menu, pictured below, in the upper right to select your country.
| When you are in your country, look in the lower left for the section with the POLITICAL OVERVIEW. This is loaded with valuable information. The background information you will get here will assist you in interpreting everything else. It will save you time in searching and sifting through the tons of information you will need to sift through! |  |
What do you want to do next? Click on one.
| Find official party pages | Read about the party or an election in the news or political science magazines |
We are used to thinking about only 2 parties here in the U.S. The countries you are examining have many parties. Not all will be on the WWW either. You may want to look at recent election results first to see who the major players are. A REFERENCE BOOK (horror!) actually is a good place to start for this, too: Political Parties of the World (JF 2051.D39 2002). And, if you followed the advice above on getting a good start, you may already know which parties are the big players!
That said, there is an exhaustive list of parties, including links to their pages if they have any, by country on Elections Around the World (http://www.electionworld.org/) Click on Parties in the blue panel on the left. WARNING about this site: use Internet Explorer. Many links don't work with other browsers. It is a very messy site... lots of frames and such. You want to be wide awake when using this. But, there is a ton of information here.
Keep in mind, though, that material FROM the parties of a certain country will most likely be in the language of the country itself. Occasionally, there will be an English translation, but that is rare.
You will need to use two different political science databases:
This database will give you mostly newsy items, from newswires and newspapers or radio broadcasts, some in translation. It is all fulltext.
Once you are in Global Newsbank, you will see this search screen:
Immediately click on more search options
That will take you to a search screen that allows you to focus your search in several very important ways:
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To find articles about political parties and elections in a specific country, it is VERY, VERY important that you fill in this search grid following this formula: Put your country name/nationality in the form shown in this example here and use the pulldown field option to select Lead/First Paragraph as shown. On the Topics line insert this Boolean search statement: |
If you do that search and you retrieve a result set of 200, you really retrieved much more than 200! It only shows you the "top" 200. Consider making one or both of these changes to the search:
1. Use an AND in the Topic Line: POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS
2. Put a specific year in the Limit by Date box. The year of an important recent election is a good choice, or 2004 to get the most recent material.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
This is a great index to political science journal articles. It is NOT fulltext. But, the articles you will find using this will be much more substantial, even scholarly! As with Global Newsbank, follow these instructions to the letter!
As soon as you enter the database, click on the 
button. That will lead you to the search grid you need.
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Follow this example/formula. Change Keywords on the first line to Descriptors and enter your country name. On the second line, enter the keyword parties. Be sure to click the Journal Articles Only box. The other things in here probably won't be helpful, but could be distracting! |
You will then get a results list of citations to journal articles. It will look like this:
The little Full-Text hotlink above some of the citations is misleading. It CAN, indeed, link you to fulltext. But, it does not know about all of the electronic fulltext we have nor does it know about the journals we have in the Periodicals Room. Often, it leads you to a database called Ingenta, that will ask you to pay a lot of money for an article. This is a glitch we are working on!
The hotlink to the far right, Check Your Library is more useful. Look at this citation, as an example:
No Full-Text link here, but we do indeed have this article available electronically in fulltext. It will take a few steps to get there, though.
Start by clicking on the Check Your Library link. That will open another browser window with a completed search grid. Click on the search button. It will take you to Oscar. If we have the journal, in print, you will see the Oscar record for it. If we have the year you need (Oscar will tell you what years we have) you could then come to the library, go up to Periodicals, and photocopy it. Alternatively, use that same 2nd browser screen to go to the library homepage, http://www.scu.edu/library/ Notice this section of the page:
especially this link: 
Click on that and type in your journal title. In this case, you are looking for West European Politics. Don't mistake the article title! Searching that, you will get this result:
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If you click on the Orradre Library Print Holdings link, you'll go to the Oscar record. Notice the other two databases, Expanded Academic ASAP and Academic Search Elite. Each has different years of the journal. In the example above, we need April, 2003. In fact, that should be in either of those databases! |
Start in Elections Around the World (http://www.electionworld.org/) . To find all the election results available for a country, click on that country in the left panel. Then, look for the small hotlink under the little map that says Parties and Elections. The Political Resources link next to it will take you to a lot of good information as well.
Two other potential sources are Election Resources on the Internet (http://www.electionresources.org) and Elections and Electoral Systems Around the World. In both, scroll down until you get to the country of interest. What is available varies quite dramatically country-country, but you could find something you didn't find in Elections Around the World.
You can find voter turnout from 1945 to date on International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (http://www.idea.int/index.htm).
This page created and maintained by Gail Gradowski, Reference Department, Orradre Library, Santa Clara University.
Page created: September 17, 2004.
Most recently edited on September 21, 2004.