Building on the growing body of research on political institutions, this article explores the causes of electoral reform, with specific reference to Latin America. What factors account for the extensive array of electoral reforms adopted in the region since the return to democracy? How are shifting patterns of political representation related to institutional change? In addressing these q…
Does the system of repeated parliamentary elections function as a mechanism of political control in new democracies with fluid party systems? Moreover, does electoral format affect the degree to which voters are able to hold legislators accountable for their performance in office? In addressing these questions, we use a new database on all legislative incumbents and all parliamentary elections …
This article takes a close look at two important theories concerning the effects that online party campaigning has on party competition. The equalization and normalization theories are tested for systematic logical dependence on conditions present in existing studies within the research field. The conditions are country-specific contextual settings and studyspecific methodology. The method of q…
Different scholars count `the number of parties' in different ways, partly because they examine different parts of the political process and for different reasons. Sartori's qualitative approach focused mainly on competition for government, but is now largely supplanted by the quantitative `effective number of parties' index, which deals with votes and seats. But some quantitative research re…
The article investigates the differences among West European countries in terms of the degree to which individuals' left—right self-placement is anchored in social, value and partisan factors. The study shows that clarity of party alternatives is much more important than political socialization in structuring citizens' left—right attitudes, i.e. the greater the clarity of party alternatives,…
Despite the scepticism that increasingly surrounds their role and standing in contemporary democracies, scholarly interest in political parties continues unabated. But this interest is also proving uneven, with relatively little attention now being given to the study of party systems. More specifically, the level of theoretical interest in party systems remains limited, with almost no substanti…
This Research Note offers an alternative explanation for the variation over time in the number of parties in India's national party system. It is argued that the actual number of parties has changed in direct response to the incentives provided by the official rules and regulations on party recognition. In turn, the raw number of parties has shaped the effective number of parties positively: t…
Did Thailand's multiple parties and factions influence cabinet and coalition durability in the period 1979 to 2001? If so, which one — parties or factions — was the more significant? Taking a Transaction Costs Analysis approach, this article addresses these questions and argues that intra-party factions, as the building blocks of Thai parliamentary politics, have been more important than…
Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian democracy in The Netherlands and offers an exp…
Situated in the literature concerning the decline of party members, and the dearth of young party members, this article considers the factors that influence the decision of a politically engaged young person to join, or not join, a political party. Making use of a unique dataset, we examine the attitudes and socialization of a large group of politically active young Canadians, a group that incl…
In general, ethnic minorities are strongly under-represented in representative bodies; however, there is no rule without exceptions. In the municipal elections in Denmark in 2001, the number of ethnic minorities who won election to the local councils throughout the country almost corresponded to their percentage in the general population. The explanation for this can be found in the Danis…
In this article, I analyse whether the electorate of different party types attributes different degrees of importance to leaders, as suggested by a recent party typology. Based on expert advice, 15 parties in six democracies were assigned to the following party types: class-mass, denominational and catch-all. Individual level data are used to determine the relative importance of leader ef…
The emergence of moderate centre—right parties in East Central Europe after 1989 was closely related to the strength and nature of organized opposition during the late communist period. Where such opposition was strong enough to take power, it went on to become the ideological, organizational and elite base for one or more moderate right parties. Where it was weak, moderate right parties were…
In this article, we attempt to explain varying patterns of centre—right success between 1990 and 2006 in three post-communist states — Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Success is understood as the ability to construct broad and durable parties. Both macro-institutional explanations, focusing on executive structures and electoral systems, and historical—structural explanations, stres…
The post-federal experience was important in shaping the structure of party competition in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, particularly on the centre—right. The cases of Slovakia and Croatia demonstrate not only how and why appeals relating to national autonomy/statehood became salient in some states in the region, but also why dominant parties stressing such themes were unable to lock…
Despite the fact that almost all Poles are Roman Catholics and that religion has played an important part in contemporary Polish politics, no self-declared Christian Democratic party has been successful in post-1989 Poland. None of the currently successful Polish centre—right parties profile themselves as Christian Democratic, nor can they be labelled as such objectively. While, superficially,…
The article examines four centre—right parties in East-Central Europe in order to assess the impact of ideology on party organization and revisit the thesis of organizational weakness in the region. The data collected indicate that, together with electoral success, inherited resources and national context, ideology does indeed shape the style of organization. Centre—right parties, as opposed …
This article is a theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of the Europeanization of political parties. On the theoretical side, it draws on the concepts of heresthetics and two-level games to conceptualize a Europeanization mechanism that has so far been overlooked in the literature. It shows that Europeanization can be a heresthetic tool in party competition, notably in terms of op…
In this article, I attempt to clarify the relationships among three contemporary concepts that are often used interchangeably or conflated in the literature: anti-establishment politics, political outsiders and populism. In order to make sense of these manifestations of public discontent, I argue that one must examine the nature of political appeals, political actors' locations vis-à-vis the pa…
It is generally assumed that in multi-level political systems political actors desire to form regional coalitions that match the party composition of the coalition governing at the central level, and that where this matching attempt does not occur it is because a possible new coalition formula for the central level is being tested at the regional one. This article shows that the congruence of p…