The Finnish National Election Study of 2003 revealed that in Finland most voters do not identify with parties and are self-described as independents. In this article it is asserted that partisan attachments affect Finnish parties’ optimal positions despite the large amount of independents. To...

This paper utilizes a non-European political system, but one with deep European roots, to highlight a specific example of one constitutionally-based rule that gives the country’sparliament effective political and executive control over the entire federal system. This rule, known as...

Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party...

This study presents a detailed discussion of the generational politics surrounding one of Germany’s most radical labor reforms - the Hartz reforms. How could it be that at the same time as their numbers were bigger than ever before, the old became political losers of one of the most...

As the size of the foreign-born population in the United States has climbed, political scientists have directed more attention to the forces that encourage or impede immigrant incorporation into the party system. Using a large two-wave panel survey of Mexican immigrants administered in the fall...

This paper explores the dynamic patterns of vote choice induced by individual assessments of the employment situation. More specifically, this paper examines the patterns of vote switching and the factors that drive changes in vote choice. Furthermore, the paper takes government partisanship...

Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behavior across different categories of votes. An examination of all recorded roll call votes in the U.S. House...

To understand the different effects of interest group lobbying across organizational sectors (business groups, trade associations, unions, and religious or charitable organizations), I utilize a database of lobbying contacts in the state of Wisconsin and match lobbying inputs with the progress...

Contemporary democracy is largely based on a framework of party government that connects the voters to the outputs of government using political parties as a linkage mechanism. This paper examines one aspect of this linkage process: how the public’s political orientations, based on the...