A proper understanding of party system change demands a dynamic theory of party competition. This should integrate accounts of competition in the legislative party system, in particular coalition formation, with accounts of competition in the electoral party system, in particular vote...

This article explores the engagement of members of the Irish lower parliamentary chamber (TDs) with Web 2.0 technologies. While conducting the website-feature analysis, the authors looked at three dimensions of each TD's website: information content, interaction tools and politicians' activities...

How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region....

Starting from controversial findings about the relationship between party systems and the prospects of democratic consolidation, this article argues that problems can only be properly addressed on the basis of a differentiated typology of party systems. Contradictory research results do not pose...

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 rise of populist radical right parties represents one of the most dramatic shifts in European party systems of the past decades. Although it has been established that the populist radical right's core appeal centers around issues of immigration and multiculturalism rather than economic...

We present a theoretical model of a parliamentary democracy, where party structures, government coalitions and fiscal policies are endogenously determined. The model predicts that, relative to proportional elections, majoritarian elections reduce government spending because they reduce party...

How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region....

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...

Electoral competition is a cornerstone of representative democracies. However, measuring its extent and intensity constitutes a challenging task for the discipline. Based on multilevel conceptualizations, we discuss three different measures of political competition (electoral volatility, vote...