We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Par-liament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the...

There has been a broad consensus among scholars of party politics that party systems in new democracies differ in some essential way from those of advanced democracies, especially in the level of party system institutionalization. One of the key dimensions of party system institutionalization is...

Political parties in post-Communist Europe experience a trade-off between policy advocating and vote-seeking. Parties seek votes to become influential political players in their political system, to gain office, and/or to implement their policies. These goals require political parties to...

Given its recent development of becoming a fully fledged legislature in EU politics, the European Parliament is increasingly compared to the USA House of Representatives. At the same time, a lot of scholars that have analyzed the evolution of party cohesion within the European Parliament (see,...

According to the responsible party, parties are assumed to present prospective policy programs on to which voters make their choices. The voters are assumed to vote for the party whose policy program is closest to their own policy preferences. The elections are in this context reckoned as a...

Coalition signals can offer crucial information to voters during political campaigns. In multiparty systems, they reduce the number of theoretically possible coalitions to a much smaller set of plausible and likely coalitions. Strategic voters who care more about the formation of the next...

This paper addresses the electoral consequences of catch-all parties' shifts to the political center. Although the move to the center of many European Social Democratic parties in the 1990s was first rewarded with victories, these parties have since faced a remarkable electoral drought that is...

Party identification plays a large role in voters decisions but what happens when the party affiliations of candidates are not readily available, as in many state supreme court and local elections? Voters are no longer able to rely on this efficient cue for making decisions and have to search...

When parties endorse policy positions and priorities, they are thought to send a signal about which policy best serves the interests, or is most consistent with the values, of their followers. Survey research has long confirmed a strong link between partisanship and policy attitudes, but left...