Despite being a consolidated democracy with free and fair elections and having a political system with intense party competition, a relatively vibrant civil society, and a functioning federal set-up, India still ranks poorly in terms of the coverage, generosity, efficiency, and quality of its...

Japan's ruling party is a prime example of a dominant party. While dominant parties in other democracies around the world have lost their grip on power or have even disappeared altogether, the LDP is still going strong. What explains the success of the party? How did the LDP acquire its dominant...

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...

We develop a unidimensional spatial model of two party competition in which parties are better informed than voters about the bliss point of voters. The announced positions of the two parties serve as signals to the voters concerning the parties' private information. Surprisingly, in all...

Japan’s ruling party is a prime example of a dominant party. While dominant parties in other democracies around the world have lost their grip on power or have even disappeared altogether, the LDP is still going strong. What explains the success of the party? How did the LDP acquire its...

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...