State subsidies to political parties: Confronting rhetoric with reality

Political Parties in State and Nation

Research on party competition in the United States suffers because existing measures do not allow for an examination of national-level competition in the states. We view this as a significant oversight, and argue that party competition in the United States must be evaluated within a federal context. Toward that end, we develop measures of partisan electoral advantage and competition based on ma...

From rhetoric to reality.

Mary Robinson was elected the first female President of Ireland in 1990, a position she held until she resigned in 1997 to take up the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. The daughter of two physicians, she holds a Master of Arts from Trinity College Dublin, a law degree from King’s Inns, Dublin, and a Master of Law from Harvard Law School. In 1...

State of children in Pakistan--confronting reality.

Political Parties and Democracy

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...

Spatial models of political competition with endogenous political parties.

Two important human action selection processes are the choice by citizens of parties to support in elections and the choice by party leaders of policy 'packages' offered to citizens in order to attract this support. Having reviewed approaches analysing these choices and the reasons for doing this using the methodology of agent-based modelling, we extend a recent agent-based model of party compe...