Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. We conduct laboratory experiments to study whether alternative voting procedures yield a two-party system as well. Plurality Voting is compared with Approval Voting and Dual Voting, both of...

This paper argues that institutions and political party systems are simultaneously determined. A large change to the institutional framework, such as the creation of the euro by a group of European countries, will realign - after a transition period - the party system as well. The new political...

Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully...

Does the level of party system institutionalization influence high-level incumbents' electoral support within subnational authoritarianism? Is it possible to ensure incumbent electoral success only with manipulative electoral practices? To what extent does this and other factors contribute to...

This research is based on theories of federalized party systems, second-order elections and nationalization of party system comparing long-established democratic federations in terms of actual autonomy of their subnational party systems. The study shows that despite obvious prerequisites for...

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. This observation can be explained by the strategic behavior of voters. The present paper derives two broad classes of voting procedures under which strategic voting behavior induces a two-party...

This paper explores the effect of party system institutionalization on the reliance of tax systems on the personal income tax. As a first step, the paper re-examines the relationship between party system institutionalization and taxation patterns employing the recently launched Government...

Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

The term "party system", explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among major parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When "party system" is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct...