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...

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...

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...