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,...

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...

It is well-established that voters behave very differently in European Parliament (EP) elections compared to national elections. They are more likely to switch their allegiances to smaller opposition parties or even to abstain. The classic explanation is that these changing patterns of behavior...

This paper argues that institutionalized party patronage -- the focus of recent studies by Barbara Geddes, Jason Brownlee, and Beatriz Magaloni -- is an ineffective source of elite cohesion. Patronage may preserve elite unity during normal times, but it is often insufficient to ensure elite...

The paper analyzes the work of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) from its founding in 1992 to the present day. The WFD is a government sponsored NGO that administers democratic political aid in Eastern and Southern Europe, former Soviet Republics, and Africa (among other regions)...

Over the past forty years, Western European countries have faced both pressures to decentralize and, conversely, pressures to transfer competencies to the supranational level of the EU. Despite the joint occurrence of these processes, the existing literature has typically explored only their...

This paper pursues two broad research questions. One of them relates to citizens' perceptions of the policy profile of political parties. Many theories of issue voting, for example, take for granted that these perceptions reflect to some degree the policies and issue stands of parties. What...