A recent paper by Madden used concentration indices to examine the bases of party support in Ireland in the 2011 election. This note updates this work to incorporate the 2016 election using the latest wave of ESS data. The results show that in terms of the bases of party supports many of the...

Party politics in Ireland has been characterised as politics without a social base. This paper calculates political concentration indices for party support in Ireland showing how support for a particular party is concentrated according to identifiable dimensions such as income, education and...

Political campaign spending ceilings are purported to limit the incumbent's ability to exploit his fundraising advantage. If the challenger does not have superior campaign effectiveness, in contrast to conventional wisdom, we show that the incumbent always benefits from a limit as long as he has...

Many existing accounts of African elections assume that voters base their electoral decisions on cues and incentives that are anchored in highly stable ethnic cleavage structures. Yet several newer contributions to the study of African electoral politics have questioned the ethno-clientelistic...

For 50 years Bolivia's political party system was a surprisingly robust component of an otherwise fragile democracy. How did a gas pipeline dispute spark a revolution that overturned the political system, destroyed existing political parties, and re-cast the relationship between state and...

The rise of outsider, populist, and nativist politicians across the West is no coincidence, nor a "sign of the times". It is symptomatic of political party systems disintegrating from the bottom up, as structural changes in the economy and society unmoor them from the major social cleavages that...