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This paper examines the evolution and characteristics of the Polish party system in the period 1991-2007, using the framework of institutionalization. Key moments in the development of the party system are identified by analyzing the results of six consecutive parliamentary elections. At the onset of the development of democratic politics, the party system was characterized by instability and under-institutionalization. By the end of the second decade, it displayed strong signs of structural stabilization and some evidence of the stability of interparty competition and party institutionalization, implying that the Polish party system is quasi-institutionalized. Moreover, the paper attempts to explain the results by focusing on elite behaviour and institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the journey of political parties in Nigeria so far through the murky and turbulent waters of politics. In doing this,the paper seeks to examine the impact of the party system,as practised in Nigeria, on the current political engineering taking place in the country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral institutions in democratic states produce incentives for politicians to manipulate economic policy for electoral gain. A growing literature on political institutions in non-democratic states has begun to focus on the effects of these institutions on political and economic systems. Recently, Gandhi and Przeworski (2001) have argued that democratic institutions function by giving support to the autocratic regimes in which they are embedded. If non-democratic institutions are functional, the natural question is whether or not they are consequential. Do democratic institutions have political and economic consequences in non-democratic states that are analogous to those of democratic institutions in democratic states? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, and build on the literature on political business cycles (PBCs) to explain how. Elections in non-democratic regimes bestow legitimacy on the ruling government by purportedly demonstrating its widespread popular support. Ruling parties in non-democratic regimes are interested in maximizing their perceived legitimacy among the population, as such legitimacy gives them free reign to pursue their policy objectives with a minimal amount of domestic opposition. Whereas some authoritarian regimes with a tight control over the press and the exchange of information can create the illusion of a wide popular mandate, other non-democratic regimes must resort to more subtle political means to garner high levels of popular support. I focus on the latter group, which Levitsky and Way (2002:53) refer to as “competitive authoritarian regimes,” where conditions are ideal for the manipulation of economic policy for electoral gain. With the significant informational asymmetry regarding macroeconomic policy in the government’s favor, I predict that non-democratic regimes manipulate fiscal policy to create popular support for the incumbent regime. I demonstrate the applicability of this reasoning with a study of fiscal decision-making accompanying the 1982 presidential elections in Mexico. Turning to a longitudinal study, I develop a more rigorous test of the hypothesis through a time-series analyses of the political and economic correlates of national account balances in Malaysia. Employing an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and adjusting for seasonal effects, I find a robust association between elections and lower quarterly budgetary surpluses from the years 1967 to 1997. At least in Malaysia, non-democratic regimes are characterized not simply by an unresponsive government, but rather by a dynamic political process. This paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways. By focusing on some of the more observable implications of economic policy manipulation in a well-defined population of states, this model lends itself to empirical verification, often difficult in the study of non-democratic states. My study also demonstrates ways in which researchers might conceive of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the populations that they govern, illuminating directions in which the study of non-democratic governance might proceed in the future. References Gandhi, Jennifer, and Adam Przeworski. 2001. “Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Dictators.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13(2). pp. 51-65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the voting behavior of Africans in seven countries currently ranked as "free" by Freedom House International. Thus, we are examining a select set of African countries, each of which hold regular elections at the national and local levels, support a free press and free speech and allow citizens to gather publicly to express their political views. Using the 2005 Round 3 Afrobarometer survey, we study why Africans in these seven free countries choose to support and vote for a particular political party. Studying the political choices of Africans who actually have the opportunity to make such choices tells us a great deal about the characteristics of democracy in these seven countries. What we find is surprising, interesting and encouraging. While ethnic ties affect vote choice in Africa, retrospective evaluations of economic performance are equally important. We find no evidence that patronage relations based on vote-buying have any effect on vote choice in any of the seven countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do political parties in some nominally democratic systems support militant wings? What effect does violence have on the distribution of voter preferences and consequent party platforms. In this paper I assume that parties care about policies. These parties can utilize violence to escape the median voter's preferred policy as well as effect their probability of winning an election. If parties are relatively immoderate, then supporting a militant wing will deter moderate voters, effectively changing the distribution of voters and allowing at least one of two parties to adopt policies closer to their ideal point. Asymmetric distributions of voters provide both ideological and electoral incentives to initiate violence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original survey data from national elections in Russia in 2000 and 2004 to explore the sources of electoral support for Putin, an example of a strong hybrid regime leader. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological congruence between median voter and the government changes substantially from one decade to the next, especially in the SMD systems of Western democracies. These changes are closely linked to changing levels of party system polarization. When the large parties are close to the median voter, any outcome creates congruent governments. When they diverge, governments are usually much further away. In the PR systems, too, some depolarization of the party system contributes to greater ideological congruence, although the connections are more complex, and cross-system differences are more diverse than in the SMD systems. This paper describes the changing levels of party system polarization from 1946 through 2003, explicating the positions of political party families and tracing the implications for ideological congruence. Under conditions of relative ideological consensus, whether of leftist or center-right orientation, there is little difference in the congruence levels of SMD and PR electoral systems. The most recent decade seems to be such a period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘The third wave of democracy’ pushed political scientists to study transition to democracy. It led to democratization as a policy option for Western countries in the context of war against terror. The donor community came up with election assistance programmes on way to deepening democracy in various countries including Pakistan. This paper seeks to analyze the strategy, process and outcome of donors’ financial and technical input in the process of transition from military to civilian rule in Pakistan in 2008. Donors focused on empowerment of electoral management body following a technocratic approach to conducting free and fair elections. They failed to bring the ultimate stakeholders, political parties, on board, ensure the accuracy of electoral rolls and mobilize civil society to that end. International observer missions determined the fairness of elections, bypassing the pre-poll electoral malpractices. In the absence of legal and institutional reform, donor input from outside remained far from satisfactory. This paper argues that donor agenda for democratization is no substitute for internal mobilization based on empowerment of political parties cultivation of democratic ethos in the citizenry. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how party experience and consistency shape party identification and vote choice. I find thatindividuals are more likely to be partisans of parties with electoral and governmental experience, but that they arenot more likely to vote for experienced parties, controlling for their party identification. Second, I find thatparties are more likely to attract individuals that are ideologically distant from them if they adopt ambiguouspositions. This is the case for both partisans and voters. Ambiguity does not have a robust effect on partisanship forindividuals ideologically close to a party, but it has a significantly negative effect on vote choice for individualsclose to a party. The paper draws on the retrospective notion of partisanship to form hypotheses about partyexperience and consistency. These are then tested using a multilevel model of survey respondents in 41 parties in 14advanced parliamentary democracies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Turkey’s Islamist parties are under scrutiny of the secularist elite and the military, which regard Islam as a destabilizing and anti-modernist force, they have steadily increased their electoral appeal since the end of the Cold War. In the recent elections held on November 3, 2002, a brand new Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), achieved a stunning success by capturing 34.31 percent of total votes. This paper argues that the JDP’s electoral victory offers a unique case to analyze (i) the reasons for the growing popularity of religious parties and (ii) how the inclusion of religious parties into a competitive electoral process promotes or hinders democracy. A review of the extant literature on religious parties’ expansion of their popular support in general and the JDP in particular reveals that their explanations can be assigned to three approaches: (i) religious parties emerge as a reaction to secularist values (conflict approach); (ii) religious parties’ popularity capitalizes on ongoing socio-economic crises (crisis approach); (iii) religious parties gain political power as anti-systemic parties (political alienation approach). Drawing upon the analysis of a national representative survey with 1000 Turkish citizens, conducted in October 2003 and a set of interviews with the JDP leadership, this paper tackles two interrelated questions: (i) to what extent the prevailing conflict, crisis and political alienation approaches to religious party support can be substantiated; and (ii) whether and how the growing religious party support translates into the consolidation of liberal democracy. Understanding the Turkey’s JDP enables us to address a set of broader questions: How does Islamist parties’ cooptation with or acceptance of the electoral rules transform the political views of Islamist partisans? Do we observe a unique interpretation of Islam by Islamist partisans when Islamist parties are accepted in electoral competition? Does the incorporation of Islamist parties into competitive electoral system moderate their political positions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine how parties respond to different electoral subconstituencies by shifting their policy positions. I argue that parties tend to respond disproportionately to the policy preferences of their supporters, and also to subconstituencies composed of the religious, ethnic, and sociodemographic groups of voters that have traditionally supported the party. Basing my conclusions on analyses of the Comparative Manifesto Project data on party positions, and national election study data on voter preferences from several European democracies, I find evidence that supports my hypotheses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Evaluating the fairness of electoral reforms is a critical requirement of electoral accountability in any democracy. After 20 years of continuous subnational electoral reforms in Argentina, however, no research has estimated the expected seat benefit for incumbent reformers. Much of this delay is due to the technical difficulties of generalizing previous seat-vote models to multi-party settings. Using a hierarchical Bayesian model we solve this analytical problem and produce comparable estimates of partisan bias and majoritarian bias in the Argentine provinces. Our estimates show large seat premiums for incumbent parties initiating electoral reforms in Argentina. By explaining the mechanisms through which local politicians successfully disengage their political environment from national level races, we also provide a general framework to understand the endogenous drive to reform subnational electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although existing research has identified important system-level explanations of cross-national differences in the levels of political support, a lot of unexplained variation remains within countries across similarly situated citizens. This study is designed to show that the role political parties play in shaping people?s views about the political system is a missing reality in the research on political trust. We argue that political parties shape people?s views about the democratic governance by generating party identification, and that partisanship operates on system support in two important ways. First, it stimulates citizen attachment to a political system; and second, it provides an important link between parties and citizens that facilitates a more effective channeling of party views to their supporters. Drawing on the survey data collected as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project together with the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data and Laver and Hunt (1992) expert surveys in eight established democracies, we find that party identifiers have more positive views about their political regime than unaligned citizens. What is more, the results of non-recursive two-stage least-squares model indicate that parties with more optimistic outlook towards the system produce higher levels of satisfaction with democracy and external efficacy among their supporters than parties with more dim views. We also find that office-seeking parties express more satisfaction with the status quo of the political regime and thus produce more positive attitudes among their supporters. This suggests that office-seeking party behavior appears to play a more favorable role for the democratic governance than has often been assumed by students of democratic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. Comparative policy research has created problems for traditional justifications of democracy as being uniquely responsive to popular opinion. There seems little party convergence on majority opinion in practice. Few governments rest on spontaneous popular majorities. ‘Consensus democracy’ relies on party elites making policy by excluding popular passions. Can a necessary connection between public opinion and public policy only be made by direct policy voting under direct democracy? We suggest an alternative mechanism – a ‘median mandate’ – and check evidence for its operation in 16 nations from 1972-91 in the important area of central government size, a key component of left-right differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop a theory explaining the variation in successor party performance following the collapse of single-party authoritarianism in 28 countries. I argue that there are three sets of factors affecting successor party performance in competitive elections - historical legacies, political institutions, and party adaptation tactics to democratic conditions. My preliminary results on a partial data set indicate that party tactics such as name changes, organizational centralization, and ideological moderation improve successor parties' electoral performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An emergent feature of politics in Nigeria is the phenomenon of godfatherism in the leadership of political parties. As a result of the political class's corruption of the electoral process and governmental structures, electoral politics and state power are skewed towards satisfying the self-regarding interests of the dominant political mentors otherwise known as 'political godfathers'. Relying on their wealth, they secure party nomination for candidates of their choice, sponsor their election, including manipulating the electoral process. This paper is intended to examine critically the phenomenon of political godfatherism in Nigeria and its implications for the people's clamour for democracy. It is also intended to proffer logically derived solutions to the problem of godfatherism and democracy in Nigeria and other developing countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at evaluation of competing explanations for the 1977 post-emergency election in India. Unlike many accounts, it finds that electoral strategy contributed as much to a defeat of the Congress Party as did frustration with the emergency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores empirically the extent to which collective party label is important in elections and its difference under various electoral rules, using the electoral data from several developed democracies. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examines the effects of party system characteristics on democratic development in Africa and Asia. We find that the effective number of legislative parties (ENLP) and legislative volatility are both positively associated with democracy. Theory: Democratic governance and meaningful elections have long been considered unattainable in absence of political parties and party competition. The nature and implications of changing party attachments in the Western advanced industrialized countries have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship in the discipline of political science (e.g., see Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), and political party systems in the “emerging democracies” have also attracted scholarly attention (e.g., see Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Dix 1992; Roberts and Wibbels 1999; Hicken 2000; Taylor-Robinson 2001; Bielasiak 2002). Many agree with Mainwaring and Scully’s (1995) contention that party system institutionalization (PSI) is important for the consolidation of democracy. Nonetheless, the precise nature of the relationship between political party systems and democracy has been difficult to distill. Indeed, scholars have made contradictory claims and reported contradictory findings regarding the effects of the different dimensions of political party systems on the consolidation of democracy. How do different party system characteristics affect democracy? Do higher ENLPs contribute to or detract from democracy? Do high levels of electoral volatility create instability and undermine democracy? We attempt to answer these questions by looking at the relationship between ENLP and electoral volatility and democracy in Asia and Africa. These are important questions to address. Different scholars have pointed to trends of rising electoral volatility rates and ENLPs in the industrialized democracies (see Dalton, McAllister, and Wattenberg 2000), and volatility rates and ENLPs in the emerging democracies are generally high. Methods: We test our theoretical expectations about the relationship between these party system characteristics and democracy with pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis covering the electoral regimes in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including those that have recently undergone transitions to democracy as well as the long-standing democracies on these continents. Our analysis covers all of the elections that have taken place in a particular country since 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the consequences of party polarization in a two-party dominant system for the two-party vote share. Political parties in two-party dominant systems rarely (if ever) converge to the position of the median voter. Drawing on modified spatial theories of party competition and voting behavior, I argue that party polarization can often preserve the two-party dominance of the system and prevent minor parties from gaining electoral ground, except when there is an established centrist alternative. Specifically, I expect the two-party share of the vote to increase in response to polarization, but decline when a small, established centrist alternative is available. Conversely, I expect the vote share of the small, centrist alternative to increase as party polarization of the major parties increases. I test these expectations using data from national election surveys, party manifestos, and electoral returns for eight Western democracies with two-party dominant systems. I find that the two-party vote share receives a boost from polarization; however, this increase is mitigated by the presence of a small, centrist party. The findings are discussed in light of variations in electoral systems and party system size. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to investigate the underlying reasons for Turkey’s pro.Islamic JDP's paradoxical success and ask why and how the AKP’s victory signifies a major shift in the balance of forces in Turkish politics in the direction of "conservative globalists." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2007 election in Nigeria underscored the country's recurring crisis of leadership, weak institutions and the very shifty commitment of its elites to the core principles of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Democratic victory in the 2006 House and Senate elections has been interpreted by some political observers as a triumph for the politics of moderation over the politics of ideological polarization as practiced by George Bush and Karl Rove since the 2000 presidential election. And the fact that Democratic candidates did very well among moderate and independent swing voters was indeed critical to their success in 2006. In a more fundamental sense, however, the 2006 elections continued and reinforced a long-term trend toward increasing polarization in American politics. Republican losses were concentrated in House districts and states where President Bush and the Iraq war were especially unpopular. Where Democrats did make gains in red states, it was largely attributable to Republican scandals and missteps, as in the Montana and Virginia Senate races. Data from national and state exit polls demonstrate that the electorate in 2006 remained deeply divided on major policy issues and especially on the war in Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant number of scholars have anlayzed the relationship between the levels of democrcay and party system institutionalization. Yet, few have done so in a large-N study. We attempt to fill in this gap by analyzing the relationship between party institutionalization and democracy in OECD, Latin American, and Post-Communist democracies. Our results show a correlation between low electoral volatility and only the highest level of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The breakdown of Mexico's hegemonic party system raises questions about the nature of the new system and of the prospects of consolidating Mexican democracy. The concern addressed in this article is that, at the very same time that democratization has made Mexicans' electoral choices more significant, frequently changing party allegiances among candidates and even elected officials renders these choices less meaningful. Since parties "matter" in a democratic polity, party-switching may prove an impediment to the development of a liberal and stable democracy. Partisan shifts within the state congress of Morelos illustrate this point. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the electoral effect of the legislativeactivities of political parties in decision making in the EuropeanParliament (EP). Challenging the influential --Second-Order Model"in studies of the EP elections, this article explores the extentthat European voters use the EP elections to hold their Europeanrepresentatives responsible for European decisions. In so doing, Iassume European voters develop at least affirmative or negativeassessments of the national parties in European decision making.Next, I develop a new measure of national party cohesion inEuropean decision making resulting from their conflicts with theirEuropean Party Groups (EPGs). Considering the conflicts as salientelectoral information, I hypothesize that European voter choice ofa party is partly determined by voters' assessment of theirparties' cohesion in European decision making. Analyses at anaggregate level with data covering the second and sixth EP showthat national parties have been punished in the EP elections whenthey act with low internal cohesion caused by the influence of theEPGs on their members' voting behavior. The results imply thatEurope indeed matters to voters' choices in the EP elections. Tothat extent, the EP elections function as instruments of Europeandemocracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We extend previous analyses of party politics in Sub-Saharan Africa and show that recent findings have been incorrect. We show that the interaction of standard variables predicts the number of parties only for democratically held elections. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing small party supporters across 18 advanced democracies, I find that sincere voting increases with party affect, and that this relationship strengthens as the electoral system becomes more open to party competition. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first phase of a multi-stage research process that aims to uncover how constitutional designs (electoral systems in particular) impact the political discourse of a polity. The hypothesis of this project is derived from Anthony Downs’ theory of democracy1 , which argues that electoral systems create diverging incentives for parties. Single member district plurality (SMDP) systems are said to favor the creation of two-party systems in which the parties will substantively gravitate toward the median voter. Systems that use proportional representation (PR) to dole out legislative seats, on the other hand, will lead to the creation of multi-party systems with parties that will tend to adhere more firmly to particularistic ideologies. This project specifically aims to observe whether or not this phenomenon is captured by the political discourse covered in the media. I hypothesize two things. First, the media in proportional democracies should give greater amounts of coverage to more parties than the media in SMDP systems. Second, because of this coverage we should also expect to observe a broader range, substantively (policy-wise and ideologically), of political discourse in the media of proportional democracies. To ease the burdens of definitions and scope, one country is chosen for examination. New Zealand is a country which has converted from a clear version of SMDP to a clear version of PR (a mixed system patterned on the German model, which Sartori2 assures us is nonetheless fully proportional because the ultimate distribution of seats is determined by the proportional component). In this sense it provides a case of natural experimentation. The independent variable has been applied and we can now observe some of the consequences. Consequently, this is a time series design that will involve a content of analysis of the media. It should prove easiest to examine the content of New Zealand’s major newspapers. This should allow for a straight forward quantification of the coverage afforded to minor parties should prove, perhaps via a straight count of the number of articles in which they receive even the briefest of mentions. Quantifying the impact of this coverage on political substance, on the other hand, will surely prove more complicated. Some kind of operationalization will have to be developed to permit an objective quantification of content related to policy or ideology. Currently, two possibilities comes to mind. One, I could focus on marginal concepts which only minor parties can and do promote (e.g. The Greens’ promotion of the precautionary principle), counting the number of articles in which the item is discussed. Second, I could simply count the number of articles in which marginal parties have the opportunity to express policy positions of any kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]