Party politics in multi-level systems has become a growing research field in political science (see Hough et al, 2003; Hough and Jeffery, 2006), but has rarely focused on comparing structures of multi-level party competition. Regional party competition is particularly important in political systems where state decentralisation has significantly shifted the electoral and coalitional incentives a...

Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every election. We model electoral system change as dri...

A prominent question in comparative electoral studies concerns the so-called personal vote. Typically, scholars approach this question at a cross-national as opposed to a cross-party level. In this article, in contrast, the author focuses on the characteristics of parties, as opposed to the characteristics of electoral systems, as determinants of candidates’personal vote seeking. The author arg...

Duverger’s law postulates that single-member plurality electoral systems lead to two-party systems. Existing scholarship regards India as an exception to this law at national level, but not at district level. This study tests the latter hypothesis through analysis of a comprehensive dataset covering Indian parliamentary elections in the period 1952–2004. The results show that a large number of ...

This paper uses a case study of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections to explore the influence of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems on party formation in a post-communist regime. The mixed PR-plurality electoral system used by Russia in the 1993 elections is a particularly useful case for such analysis for it allows the simultaneous study of these two electoral syst...