with level of PT is the average gap between the first and second most popular parties. Regardless of electoral system, which has little association with it, this is the party system variable that is most closely linked with level of PT. It is this form of party system competitiveness that best fosters PT. In terms of elite strategy, grand coalitions very obviously provide the most effective way...

The old, understudied electoral system composed of multi-member districts, open ballot and plurality rule is presented as the most remote scene of the origin of both political parties and new electoral systems. A survey of the uses of this set of electoral rules in different parts of the world during remote and recent periods shows its wide spread. A model of voting by this electoral system dem...

We delineate three mechanisms that could explain women's under-representation in electoral lists and political power: voter demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics. We use Spain's Equality Law, which mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists, to test these alternative theories. The law was enacted by the Social-Democratic Party after the surprise parliamentary electora...

Theoretical spatial models of electoral voting tend to predict either convergence to an electoral mean (when voting is probabilistic) or chaos (when voting is deterministic). Here, we construct an empirical model of voting for the Israeli Knesset in 1992 (based on a large electoral sample and on analysis of party declarations). The probabilistic voting model so estimated fits the known election...

Models of elections tend to predict that parties will maximize votes by converging to an electoral center. There is no empirical support for this prediction. In order to account for the phenomenon of political divergence, this paper offers a stochastic electoral model where party leaders or candidates are differentiated by differing valences—the electoral perception of the quality of the party ...

There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote.They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a was...

This article investigates the dynamics that gender quota reforms create within and between government and opposition parties in electoral authoritarian dominant-party states. A dominant-party state regularly holds relatively competitive elections, but the political playing field is skewed in favor of the government party. We investigate the circumstances under which gender quotas’ goal of furth...

Electoral coordination refers to the use by political parties of a concerted strategy that makes most effective use of electoral rules to maximize their interests in legislative elections. Coordination requires both strategic thinking and political discipline, however, and in relatively new democracies these conditions may not exist. In this study I examine electoral coordination in the Hungari...

This article examines how party discipline and legislators’ individual policy goals induced by electoral rules influence the likelihood of defections from the party line in the Bundestag. Using a new indicator based on legislators’ explanations of their voting behaviour we find strong evidence that discipline, not policy cohesiveness alone, drives party unity. In particular, the allocation of o...