This paper introduces the `noncompensatory principle' of coalition formation. This principle states that in a choice situation, a negative or low score on the political dimension cannot be compensated for with a positive score on other dimensions (see Mintz, 1993; Mintz and Geva, 1994a, b; Mintz et...

Political parties are often argued to compete for voters by stressing issues they feel they own - a strategy known as 'selective emphasis'. While usually seen as an electorally rewarding strategy, this article argues that cultivating your themes in the public debate is not guaranteed to be...

Party politics in the European Parliament (EP) consists of competition between transnational party groups, each consisting of multiple national member parties from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). Identifying the policy space that these parties inhabit and their ideological...

Abstrac: Although party competition is widely regarded as an important part of a working democracy, it is rarely analysed in political science literature. This article discusses the basic properties of party competition, especially the patterns of interaction in contemporary party systems....

This paper deals with some of the theoretical and methodological concerns arising from an in-depth analysis of one of the most successful research groups in comparative politics: the Comparative Manifesto Project. The first part of the paper discusses its theoretical background: the...

The German social democratic party initiated in 2003 the greatest overhaul of labour market legislation in decades, severely cutting unemployment benefits and slashing employment protection legislation. How can we explain this radical policy shift? This paper will present a counter-intuitive...

This paper assesses the influence of the electoral threat of third parties on major-party roll call voting in the US House. Although low-dimensionality of voting is a feature of strong two-party politics, which describes the contemporary era, there is significant variation across members. I...

For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of...

The objective of this paper is to provide a political economy explanation of the empirically observed negative correlation between employment protection and insurance. We study an economy composed of four groups of agents (capitalists, unemployed people, low- and high-skilled workers), each one...