We study party formation in a general model of collective decision-making, modelling parties as agglomerations of policy positions championed by decision-makers. We show that in the presence of economies of party size and a one-dimensional policy space, players agglomerate into exactly two parties. This result does not depend on the magnitude of the economies of party size or sensitively on the...

Researchers in the area of electoral systems have recently turned their attention to network flow techniques with the aim to resolve certain practically relevant problems arising in this area. The aim of the present paper is review some of this work, showing the applicability of these techniques even to problems of a very different nature. Major emphasis will be placed on “biproportional apport...

When and how do third-party actors—most prominently electoral commissions, courts, and observers—contribute to the integrity of the electoral process? We approach these questions by studying how third-party actors shape politicians’ incentives to comply with the outcomes of elections. Third parties are most beneficial in close elections, when the threat of a post-election confrontation alone fa...

The Efficacy and Efforts of Interest Groups in Post Elections Policy Formation This paper presents a new model of interest groups and policy formation in the legislature. In our setting, the already given party ideological predispositions and power distribution determine the expected policy outcome. Our analysis applies to the case of un-enforced or enforced party discipline as well as to two-p...

Much writing on party organisational development in post-communist East Central Europe has argued that, with the partial exception of successor parties to former regime parties, political parties in the region will be state-centred, low-membership organisations dominated by political elites, which loosely approximate to the ‘cartel’ and ‘electoral-professional’ models of party identified by som...