The recent rise and stability in macropartisanship has focused interest upon the long-term dynamics of party bases. Commentators cite immigration and youth as forces which will produce a natural Democratic advantage in the future while conservative writers highlight the importance of high...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Electoral institutions shape the potential costs and benefits of participation. We argue that, by shaping the range and diversity of choices available to voters, electoral institutions can pull citizens into the democratic process by making voting meaningful. Our analyses of data from 29...

This paper uses co-voting rates between members of the European Parliament as a social network measure and investigates the structure of EP co-voting networks. It argues that the propensity of members of the same legislative party to cast like-votes is largely attributable to 'perceived...

This research examines the process and pattern of party system development and stabilization in Poland from 1991 to 2007. The goal is to establish which, if any, aspects of the party system were effectively consolidated during this period, which were not, and what aspects of the broader...

More so than many other political institutions, political parties are held in considerable disrepute. This is due in large part to widespread perceptions that both party politicians and parties as organizations are corrupt. This is especially the case in the newer democracies of postcommunist...