It has been an act of will to offer a reader on the European party systems after celebrated examples of the past, above all Josep Colomer's Comparative European Politics, which has reached the third, revised and updated, edition. Marco Lisi has taken the burden to collect contributions on a swathe of European countries, on both sides of the Berlin wall. This is the first asset of the book: an encompassing overview of European party systems including neglected cases such as Romania and Bulgaria. The second asset is the format of each chapter, which offers background information on the system, analysis of the electoral laws and the basic institutional rules, of the party system format and inter-party dynamics, of the cleavages and coalitions. The format is followed quite scrupulously by all the contributors; and thus the consistency among the chapters provide the editor with all the elements for his final evaluation of the status of party politics in contemporary Europe.

Most of the chapters are detailed, well informed and convincing, particularly the ones on Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Bulgaria and Denmark. Others are informative, and in some case less pointing probably for the juniority of the contributors.

Quite insightful is the analysis of the Spanish case, a system under stress. The authors convincingly asses that the new parties and the new ‘divide’ – as they attentively say, avoiding the too frequent misuse of the term cleavage – which pit ‘old against new’ is aligned with the left–right continuum (p. 265). This leads the authors to stress that the growing polarization and fragmentation of the system – and Vox and the Catalonia uprising had not yet erupted at the moment of the writing of the essay – may no longer be contained by the so-called ‘over institutionalization’ of the Spanish party politics. A forecasting statement, indeed!

The essay on the Netherlands presents some concerns on the ‘unprecedented period of turmoil’; however, the author is confident in the virtues of consociationalism: change could be, once again, mastered (p. 190). On the contrary, the German case is described with a hint of worries. The author finds the present German party system ‘less resilient’ and ‘more unstable’ than before, and even if ‘a structural deformation of the party system is not yet identifiable, the risk of new tectonic shifts in the next years prevails’ (p. 110; emphasis our). Party change in Denmark, on the other hand, is a standard practice, as the party system underwent a dramatic transformation already in the early 1970s. Now, the ‘new parties of the 1970s have been replaced’. The long standing ups and downs of the party system allow the authors to say that the system has been, and still is, capable to ‘absorb both short-terms and long-terms changes’ in an interplay between new political demands and new offers (pp. 76–77). These few examples only show the insightfulness of the single countries chapters, where one can find, in most of the cases, either a wealth of information and acute interpretations of the party system evolution.

At the end of the book the editor, Marco Lisi, attempts at providing a European-wide interpretative framework. Lisi underlines four main features distinguishing the demand by the voters, and the supply by the parties. First, dealignment indicators such as fragmentation volatility and polarization are on the rise, especially on the demand side; second, realignment is undergoing and it affects either the electorate (demand) and the party system (offer); third, change in the competition for government is characterized by changes in the supply side, rather than by a different distribution of voters’ preferences and fourth, as the author writes, ‘there is more continuity and adaptation rather than radical changes. This means that the main feature of the party system remained unchanged’ (p. 312). Indeed, Lisi does not see ‘a homogenous effect of the Great Recession on party systems’, and he suggests a more idiosyncratic ‘fine grained’ approach to gauge the variations, even if he advances that, ‘at the end, dealignment is the most typical’ pattern of change in the European party systems (p. 313).

Lisi, however, goes beyond the summary of the various contributions and, in the last sections of the conclusions, he ‘expands the evidence’ to all European party system. He assesses that fragmentation and volatility, as for the countries surveyed in the volume, increase also in a larger European-wide scale; and that the traditional party families – Social-democratic and Christian-democratic – manifest the higher decrease in the after-recession period, 2009–2017. This outcome leads the author to calculate the average vote of the ‘moderate-centrist parties’ – those whose location in the left–right continuum ranges between 3 and 7 points – in order to verify the hypothesis of the crisis of the mainstream parties, and conversely, the rise of new parties, after 2009. The hypothesis is confirmed, even if a clear difference emerges between Western and Central-Eastern countries as the latters display a higher number of new comers.

Lisi's final remarks point to the legitimation deficit of political parties: their debatable accountability has raised concerns about their representativeness, and this brings back Mair's distinction between responsiveness and responsibility. As the confidence in parties and elected officials has reached such a low level, ‘protest voting and institutionalization of new parties as well as electoral instability’ will probably boost (p. 328). However, having stated that, Lisi takes a caution move in last sections of the conclusions. He warns on the relative dimension of change and the cross-country variations rather than taking a fierce stance on the passage of epoch with the coming of the second decade of the century. Such cautiousness is a sign of a mature scholarship, which warns about the complicate equation of the party system change. Thanks to the editor's final statements this book, beyond all the information it offers, it stimulates to think about causes and consequences of the present state of flux of party politics all over the continent.