Recent research on political parties and ethnicity has challenged the conventional wisdom about ethnicity as the major factor that explains voter alignment in Africa. The paper maintains that the cleavage model, although modified to include ethnicity, still provides heuristically the best...

The ideological congruence between the median citizen and the government is shaped by various institutional features, especially the party system. The polarization of the party system has large and robust effects on ideological (in)congruence across a variety of political systems. As captured by...