The stability of voters’ partisan choices from election to election is a key feature of democratic politics, but why it varies across advanced industrial democracies and elections is not well understood. This study makes several key contributions to explaining electoral volatility. Firstly, it...

The seeming entrenchment of a two-coalition system in Malaysia solidifies the centrality of strongly institutionalised parties in the polity. The primary parties in Malaysia reach deeply into society and nest within dense networks of both intra-party and external organisations. Given this order...

On the basis of factors such as ideology, the degree of populism, political leadership and form of the government a complex comparativeanalysis of the formation and development of the party system in Lithuania and Russia in the post-communist period wascarried out. Summing up, it should be noted...

The basic patterns of the initial Indonesian party system have reemerged after more than four decades of authoritarianism. The cleavage model by Lipset and Rokkan is well-suited to analyzing the genesis of and the most salient features of this party system. However, in applying the approach,...

Do political institutions shape the structure of public spending? Based on a sample of 141 elections in eighteen Western European countries over the period 1970-1998, this paper shows that governments’ margin of maneuverability to design and implement fiscal policies depends on the level of...

This discussion on the South African party system looks at the past, present and possible future of the party system in terms of a number of indicators, notably: voter participation, number of political parties, competition, ideological distance, characteristics of political parties, voter...

One of the most persistent areas of discussion regarding South Korea's party and election systems is the continued elevation of regional personalities over political institutions. We seek to pour new wine into old bottles, however, by challenging a seldom-considered assumption in Korean studies;...

This paper looks at several developments that have taken place in domestic politics on Taiwan since the election of Chen Shui-bian as president of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1998. After discussing the political successes and failures of the incumbent Chen administration, it analyses its...

There is now a considerable body of literature on decentralization in diverse national contexts. Ascertaining factors that drive local accountability and performance have been the key concerns of these studies. Diverse ethodological instruments and approaches have been used—from large-n...