Polarisation over cultural issues and the emergence of radical, often populist, challenger parties indicate a fundamental restructuring political conflict in Western Europe. The emerging divide crosscuts and, part, reshapes older cleavages. This special issue introduction highlights how transformation cleavage structures relates to dynamics polarisation participation. contributions innovate two...

A ranking exists in electoral systems research of different electoral formulas—the mathematical functions governing the conversion of votes into legislative seats—in terms of both proportionality of seats and votes and favorability to the largest party. I reexamine this issue with new methods and new evidence, attempting to cross-validate previous rankings using a larger and more controlled dat...

Electoral rules are a crucial institutional factor shaping the entry and success of new parties. However, testing how they affect voting behavior is problematic when using observational data in cross-national studies. As district magnitude usually correlated with politically salient features affecting likelihood for (and small) parties, latent support small parties differs across electoral syst...

With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones over the last decade, a new electoral map of Italy has emerged. We explore how these ongoing changes to party politics in Italy were manifest spatially between 1987 and 1996. In particular, the geographical aspects of party replacement are examined in central and northern Italy. First, the parties ...

Electoral systems have been shown to influence strategic voting and the development of party systems but the focus has rarely been on the strategies that parties adopt to take advantage of the electoral system under which they compete. Electoral pacts form one such strategy. We present a bargaining model which allows us to explore the factors influencing the extent and content of electoral pact...

Nearly half of the world’s presidential democracies choose their chief executives using a majority-runoff electoral rule (MRO), while most others used single-round plurality. What difference does it make? On the one hand, critics of MRO assert that the lower threshold of the first round inflates the number of presidential candidates, and with it the size of the party system. A fragmented party ...

This paper looks at the stability of policy outcomes under di erent electoral systems. The political game among parties and party supporters of di erent ideologies involves pre-election coalition formation as well as after-election parliamentary bargaining. Voters' preferences vary across districts and over time. We show that under proportional representation there exists a unique stable policy...

We develop an equilibrium model to analyze the role of the media in electoral competition. Policy payoffs in the model are state dependent. We show that voters cannot infer the state directly from off-equilibrium party policies. As a result, party policies do not converge to the median voter’s ideal policy when the media report only party strategies. News analyses that convey information about ...

The British voter is less likely than the American to make a distinction between his current electoral choice and a more general partisan disposition. This article investigates whether this difference might be due to a methodological difference between the British and American Election surveys: the British surveys, unlike the American, have placed the party identification question after the que...

Formal models of voting usually assume that political agents, whether parties or candidates, attempt to maximize expected vote shares. ‘Stochastic’ models typically derive the ‘mean voter theorem’ that each agent will adopt a ‘convergent’ policy strategy at the mean of the electoral distribution. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is contradicted by empirical evidence. Estimates...