Russell J. Dalton is Professor of Political Science and founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at University of California-Irvine. Dalton has been awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship, Scholar-in-Residence at the Barbra Streisand Center, German Marshall Fund Research Fellowship, and the POSCO Fellowship at the East West Center in Hawaii.

David M. Farrell is Professor of Politics and Head of the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. He is a specialist in the study of parties and electoral systems, founding co-editor of Party Politics, and co-editor of the ECPR/Oxford University Press series, Comparative Politics.

Ian McAllister is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Australian National University.
He has been director of the Australian Election Study since 1987, and was Chair of the Comparative Study of Electoral System project from 2004 to 2009. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Corresponding Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Recipient of the 2012 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship

"Political Parties and Democratic Linkage offers a valiant defence of the often lamented role of parties in contemporary democratic processes. Dalton, Farrell and McAllister argue that despite their poor public image, parties still dominate elections, that newly incumbent governments are more closely connected to citizen preferences than their predecessors in office, and that voter opinion, operating through parties, matters for policy outputs. This is an important book for students of parties as well as for students of democracy."--Peter Mair, Professor of Comparative Politics, European University Institute, Florence