In previous chapters, we discussed the contextual factors that affect the development of political systems. However, the evolution of political systems is not merely a function of the economic, social, cultural, and international environments. Political democracy is also as much a product of human choices as it is a product of context, particularly the choice of institutions that help shape the...

In the model presented here, n parties choose policy positions in a space Z of dimension at least two. Each party is represented by a ‘‘principal’’ whose true policy preferences on Z are unknown to other principals. In the first version of the model the party declarations determine the lottery outcome of coalition negotiation. The coalition risk functions are common knowledge to the parties. We...

This paper analyses the impact of electoral institutions on party system stability and change in twelve countries of post-communist Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. It argues that in the post-communist context it is necessary to break party system change down into two components: volatility and replacement. Volatility, a concept already well developed in the literature, refers to cha...

This article explicates the mechanisms through which presidential elections shape the legislative party system, an issue that has received little attention to date. The authors argue that presidential elections exert their influence through two distinct channels. First, they affect the incentives of candidates, voters, and parties to coordinate within electoral districts. Second and most import...

Utilizing data from 15 countries that employ mixed electoral systems, we provide a crossnational analysis of the defining elements and potentially constraining effects of such systems. Using district level election results, we examine the effects of the proportional representation (PR) and single-member district (SMD) tiers of mixed systems separately and in combination. We also test the effect...

Most theoretic models of multiparty electoral competition make the assumption that party leaders are motivated to maximize their vote share or seat share. In plurality-rule systems this is a sensible assumption. However, in proportional representation systems, this assumption is questionable since the ability to make public policy is not strictly increasing in vote shares or seat shares. We pre...

According to Olson’s concept of encompassing organizations, strong two-party, plurality oriented political systems should create more ‘responsible’ public policies than ‘weak’ multi-party governments based on proportional representation. An empirical measure of ‘encompassment’, termed popular cabinet support, is developed and tested in a multivariate controlled statistical analysis of 18 indust...