In the last ten years, economic issues related to currency policy have become the major ongoing dispute between China and the U.S. Especially the U.S. Congress is stridently demanding a tougher policy to avert the negative consequences for the U.S. economy of "unfair" Chinese policies in the...

Analyses of the shape and functioning of systems of political rule need to address informal institutions, which exist alongside and can relate to formal institutions in various ways. In this paper, I first discuss some analytical foundations of the study of such institutions. I then suggest that...

Executive power sharing has been practiced widely in the Asia‐Pacific region, in both formal and informal ways. This paper examines the theory and practice of these various approaches to the sharing or dividing of governing power across the region. I look first at the broad issues of executive...

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnicity provides the social cleavage for voting behav-iour and party affiliation in Africa. Because this is usually inferred from aggregate data of national election results, it might prove to be an ecological fallacy. The evidence based on individual data from...

It is generally acknowledge that a higher degree of party and party system institutionalisation is positively correlated with the consolidation of democracy. It is, thus, useful to compare different levels and types of insititutionalisation. In this article the distinction made by Levitsky...

Starting from controversial findings about the relationship between party systems and the prospects of democratic consolidation, this article argues that problems can only be properly addressed on the basis of a differentiated typology of party systems. Contradictory research results do not pose...

Surprisingly, the outcome of the 1999 and 2004 elections in Indonesia and the resultant constellation of political parties are reminiscent of the first Indonesian parliamentary democracy of the 1950s. The dynamics of party politics is still marked by aliran ("streams"), i.e. some of the biggest...