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Prior studies have shown that electoral rules fail to determine the number of parties in new democracies due to the uncertainty of voters and politicians about which parties are viable. Latin American democracies, where electoral volatility has generally remained high and party institutionalization low, have been a primary example of this phenomenon. We argue that even in shifting political environments the fragmentation of the party system is likely to become consistent with the permissiveness of electoral rules and the level of social diversity as voters and party leaders accumulate experience with elections and the rate of electoral regime change declines. We find support for these propositions analyzing an original dataset on Latin American democratic elections. This article contributes to research on electoral systems and political parties by identifying the conditions under which equilibrium electoral outcomes can be expected after a transition to democracy in unstable institutional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has the adoption of internet-based platform politics impacted Latin American party systems? This paper fills an important gap by creating novel categories and tracing patterns for understanding how political parties of 18 Central and South American countries practice politics online. Our work is informed by the equalization versus normalization debate between that sees the Internet as either consolidating institutional parties' strength or giving strategic advantage to new and smaller parties. Our analysis takes a four-step approach to address the initial question. First, we conceptualize platform politics in a Latin American context and generate hypotheses. Second, we create a dataset to map online and offline national party systems across Latin America. Third, we introduce four categories (equalizers, normalizers, laggards, marginals) to capture different parties' online positioning. Last, we explore platform politics by comparing four parties belonging to the different categories – FMLN in El Salvador, Novo in Brazil, PPC in Peru, and MORENA in Mexico – and showing how they use social media to overcome their structural limits. Overall, this work finds great regional variation to extend the validity of the cyclical nature of equalization and normalization to the Latin American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Politik is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study of party systems tends to focus on individual parties and overlooks factions and other sub-party units. Although the impact of the district magnitude on the number of electoral parties is well established, the electoral rules incentives on party subunits have been overlooked. Using electoral results at the district level, we assess the effect of the district magnitude on the effective number of parties and effective number of factions competing in elections and with legislative seats in Colombia (1958–1990). By focusing on parties and factions, we produce empirical evidence from 444 datapoints to support the claim made elsewhere that roots of multi-partism were present throughout the period studied, including under the National Front (1958–1970), where only two parties were permitted. The district magnitude impacts the number of parties and the number of party subunits, but its effect is stronger on the former. When the National Front came to an end and electoral rules were modified in the 1970s, there was an increase in party factionalism and new parties in the years before multiparty system rules were enshrined in the 1991 constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike other key party system properties (e.g. fragmentation, volatility), polarization lacks a publicly available cross-national and longitudinal dataset that can be used as an established source among the scientific community. This article aims to fill this gap by introducing a novel publicly available dataset of party system ideological polarization in Western European party systems. The dataset relies on multiple expert surveys and provides measures of party system ideological polarization for each parliamentary election and legislature in 20 Western European countries since 1945. The article also presents party system polarization’s comparative longitudinal trends, drivers, and links with other key party system properties. It finds that party system ideological polarization is on the rise in Western Europe, mainly due to a progressive shift in the electoral support from ideologically moderate mainstream parties to more extreme challenger parties. Moreover, in recent years, high party system polarization has recurred in highly fragmented and volatile contexts, thus creating a detrimental context for the working of democracy.

Studies focusing on Belize reveal that clientelism is the glue that makes the party system stick. We explore whether ideology and ethnicity account for partisanship within that deeply clientelist setting. We use four AmericasBarometer survey waves by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to study the individual-level correlates of partisan attachments with the People’s United Party (PUP) and United Democratic Party (UDP). Using binary and multinomial probit maximum likelihood estimators, we find that ethnicity correlates to partisanship with the PUP, and ideology correlates to partisanship with the UDP. The robustness checks, which focus on declared vote choices in previous national elections, corroborate our findings. The Belizean case shows how clientelist parties can develop alternative support sources and that these can vary substantially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American party systems are characterized by a proliferation of new parties of very different sizes, backgrounds, and developmental trajectories, which poses a conceptual challenge. Historically, conceptualizations of new parties have often prioritized data accessibility over methodological and theoretical rigor. As a result, they have produced a plethora of highly heterogeneous cases that are ill-suited for theory testing. To address this problem, we propose the development of a conceptual tool aimed at identifying a subset of relevant new parties, termed “break-in parties” (bip) because of their potential impact on prevailing patterns of representation and party competition. We have identified a corpus of 24 such parties founded between 1960 and 2002 in South America. These parties exhibit sufficient similarity to facilitate meaningful attributions, while also providing variability in relevant independent and dependent variables for testing theories of party system change through the emergence and success of new parties, a topic that has received considerable attention in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The municipal elections of 2015 and 2019 transformed local party systems towards multiparty models and decentralized the power historically held by the two major state-based parties. This study presents an unprecedented global view of this process of change in the political configuration of power in the Spanish city councils of provincial capitals and the two autonomous cities. It adopts a broad longitudinal perspective, covering six electoral moments over the last two decades, analyzing a total of 312 mayoral elections cases. The analysis is based on an original database that tracks variations in the number of parties with representation, the types of governments on which the constitution of the mayoral offices is based, and the resulting positions occupied by the different parties. The results indicate that in 2015 and 2019, there was an increase in parties sharing power, with a reduction in majority governments in favor of coalitions and minority governments. In 2023, despite a return to a scenario with fewer parties and an increase in majority governments, it cannot be asserted that the party system has reverted to its pre-Great Recession state, as major parties such as the PP still rely in other political formations to form the governments in many provincial capitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political finance in liberal democracies is often regarded as a source of pathology accompanied by demands for reform. But on what principles and values should political finance reform be grounded? The existing scholarship provides no more than sketchy advice on such matters. To address this gap, this paper presents a normative framework to evaluate political finance rules, which proposes (a) that the design of such rules should take account of the party system in which the financing rules will operate; (b) that both political finance rules and party systems should be evaluated in terms of three normative dimensions of partisanship (collegiality, systemic voice, and systemic accountability); and (c) that political finance reforms ought to counterbalance the pathologies inherent to different party systems. A set of political finance rules that satisfies these three conditions is an instantiation of what we describe as the 'civic model of political finance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties' issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties' issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the foundational principles of the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) party, focusing on its authoritarian-populist stance, ideological roots, and policy objectives. It delves into the repercussions of PiS's anti-democratic measures, particularly in the arear of the Constitutional Court, human rights, and protection of human rights, and control over media outlets and news agencies. These actions have led to visible and anticipated outcomes, sparking widespread criticism both domestically, from Polish opposition groups and activists, and internationally, from foreign politicians and organizations. The article aims to provide a thorough description and examination of the ongoing political dynamics within the country, specifically the authoritarian trends stemming from PiS's nationalist-imbued populism being elevated to the status of the state's governing ideology. The study segments the political landscape into three distinct categories: the underlying factors driving PiS's authoritarian trajectory rooted in its overarching authoritarian-populist worldview, the attitudes, imperatives, and strategies shaping PiS's policy responses and problem-solving approaches, and the political shifts observed as a consequence of these dynamics.

This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents' satisfaction with democracy and self‐reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience‐based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Constitutional History / Giornale di Storia Costituzionale is the property of Giornale di Storia Costituzionale (Journal of Constitutional History) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

About two decades ago Reilly (2000) suggested that the South Pacific region was undergoing a process of 'Africanization'. One of the symptoms of this process of 'Africanization' was represented by the fact that the institutions of governance were weak and that party systems were fragmented. The purpose of the present note is to argue that while Reilly is correct in suggesting that parties in the South Pacific are weak and party systems are fragmented, there are major differences between African and South Pacific party systems that prevent one from speaking of 'Africanization' of the South Pacific party systems. There are several differences between Sub-Saharan African and the Pacific Island states: first, the quality of government, as evidenced by political stability and absence of violence, is higher in the Pacific than in Sub-Saharan Africa; second, Sub-Saharan party systems are characterized by fairly low levels of fragmentation coupled with high levels of fluidity whereas in the Pacific Island states party systems are highly fragmented but fairly stable over time; third, the presence of atomized party systems in Sub-Saharan Africa is exceptional, while in the Pacific region it tends to be the rule; fourth, in the Pacific region fluidity is negatively associated with the fragmentation of the party system, while in Sub-Saharan Africa fragmentation and fluidity go together; fifth, greater party system instability is associated with and possibly responsible for a deterioration of governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, while it does not affect the quality of government in the Pacific Island states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tackle the problem of simulating seat- and vote-shares for a party system of a given size. We show how these shares can be generated using unordered and ordered Dirichlet distributions. We show that a distribution with a mean vector given by the rule described in Taagepera and Allik (2006, Electoral Studies 25, 696–713) fits real-world data almost as well as a saturated model where there is a parameter for each rank/system size combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is cultural political polarization caused by a convergence of policy positions on an economic dimension that is in turn effected by globalization? Or is globalization influencing economic and cultural polarization separately, if not independently? This article argues that an influence of globalization on both economic and cultural polarization are supported by empirical evidence. I show that (a) economic globalization exerts a depolarizing influence on an economic dimension and a polarizing influence on a cultural dimension; (b) neither economic nor cultural polarization influence polarization on the other dimension; (c) voters in Germany who express more fear of globalization are more likely to vote for the far-right AfD; and (d) fear of globalization is not related to voting for parties that compete on an economic left–right scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conference in Poona that led to the foundation of Indian National Congress in 1885 aimed to serve as the germ of a native parliament to provide a reply to the assertion that India was still unfit for any form of representative institution. It spearheaded the Indian independence movement and post 1947 ushered in a 'Congress system' of one-party dominance that represented a historical consensus with few parallels in any political party system in the world. Dialectical contradiction has been a historic recurrence in the Congress as 'personality cults' of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi in the early years and a 'high command culture' later on decimated its hegemonic power in competitive party politics. The Congress declined due to a deficit of political vision, lack of forward-thinking ideas, engagement in competitive pseudo-secularism and diminishing electoral returns of dynastic (Nehru-Gandhi) politics. The institutionalization of BJP as a dominant party in 2014 coincided with the deinstitutionalization of the Congress party system. The grand old party needs to relegitimize itself by revamping its ideology, formulating a populist model of governance, creating son-of-the-soil leadership, revitalizing the party system, re-engaging with citizens, altering its politics to meritocracy and embracing new age electoral grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable evidence suggests that social diversity increases the number of political parties. While a vast literature examines this relationship by measuring social diversity as ethnic fragmentation, the convenience of capturing the level of social heterogeneity by using alternative indicators has been traditionally overlooked. In this article, I offer new evidence that documents the impact of social diversity on party system size by proxying the former as the number of social classes. Using both objective class positions and subjective class identifications and employing two different datasets that cover democratic legislative elections around the world between 1981 and 2015, I find that the effective number of social classes has a positive effect on party system fragmentation when the average district magnitude in a democracy is high. Given the difficulty to test these effects in a cross-country environment net of unobserved heterogeneity, I examine the robustness of the findings in Spain between 2000 and 2016, an ideal case due to large differences in district magnitude and a changing party system. Overall, the results suggest that high levels of social diversity are likely to increase party system fragmentation when the electoral system is permissive enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the classic effects of economic crises is their impact on the stability of the political party system in democratic societies; however, in the case of Portugal initial data on the 2008 crisis suggest that this is an exception. The aim of this study is to analyse the degree of stability of the Portuguese party system during the last five general elections (2009, 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2022), and to generate hypotheses to interpret its particularities. The applied methodology consists of performing a statistical analysis using data provided by the Ministry of Internal Administration of the Portuguese Government to elaborate indicators of electoral evolution, competitiveness, volatility and fragmentation. The results show that the 2008 crisis favored alternation in government between the two major parties, but stability of the party system was maintained. An interpretative hypothesis is that the high capacity for pacts maintained by the Portuguese parties was responsable for this stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains political polarization across developing democracies? In contrast to extant studies, this article develops a novel argument that links electoral (in)stability at the party system level with varying levels of polarization. Specifically, we claim that increasing levels of electoral volatility generate high levels of uncertainty among partisan elites, which respond by setting clear policy positions that are frequently far away from the center in the ideological spectrum. As such, higher levels of volatility engender higher levels of polarization. Further, because the majority of party system change in developing democracies comes mainly from the emergence of new parties, we decompose the effects of stable party system volatility (for established parties) and replacement party system volatility (for newly competing parties) and hypothesize that higher levels of replacement volatility—as opposed to stable volatility—generate higher levels of polarization. Our main theoretical claims find strong qualitative and quantitative support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1996 electoral reform in Uruguay separated national form the subnational elections. Both elections are held six months apart, but by different electoral systems: two round majority for presidential elections, and plurality for the elections of departmental mayors. In this context, parties that compete in the two elections are strictly the same and the electorates are practically identical. This makes it possible to compare the electoral results in each constituency with a system that encourages strategic behaviors and other that do not. The estimated results point out a robust reducing effect of the plurality system on the effective number of parties and show the effects of strategic behaviors of parties and voters under this electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which the left–right dimension still structures party systems in highly developed, industrialized democracies is a contested field in comparative politics. Most studies in this area take the position that a stable and universal left–right dimension is either still the most important game in town or has become obsolete and replaced by other policy dimensions. Although country-specific studies focusing on voters' left–right self-placement discover different meanings of left and right that vary between countries and change over time, few macro-comparative studies focusing on parties or governments take this aspect into account. Using a left–right concept for party politics from the PIP project on Parties, Institutions and Preferences that distinguishes an ideological core derived from political theory, as well as country- and time-specific issues uncovered through empirical analysis, the article demonstrates fundamental differences in the relevance and meaning of left and right by analyzing 34 party systems from 1945 to 2020. The article shows that the thesis of the decline of the left and right is premature. An important aspect for the continued high relevance of the left–right dimension is the fact that left and right changes their meaning by including controversial issues such as European integration, migration and environmental degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 switching, and voters' availability) and their relation to each other. We argue that electoral volatility and vote switching as indicators of electoral competitiveness tend to misestimate the degree of competition in multiparty systems. As an alternative, we propose focusing on the individual's propensity to vote for different parties, i.e. electoral availability. Using data provided by the European Election Studies, we compare availability to electoral volatility and vote switching in the framework of necessary and sufficient conditions. Our regression results show that operationalizing electoral competitiveness based on voter availability – which is increasingly retrievable from cross-national voter surveys – helps to avoid type-II errors, i.e. identifying competitive elections as less or non-competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party systems and party system change have long been one of the most studied topics within the comparative politics literature, yet most work in this field focuses on changes that occur between elections, neglecting the possibility that parties and party systems may reconfigure during the inter-election period. Building on the studies on party system change, this paper aims to analyse how individual changes in party affiliation can aggregate into changes at the level of parliamentary party system in the 18th Italian legislature. To achieve this goal, data on individual movements in the membership of parliamentary parties in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies are used to track the extent of party system change over time, as indicated by changes in the number of relevant parties, their relative size and strength, and the general structure of competition in the Italian parliament. Overall, our results show major changes in the main features of the Italian parliamentary party system and the structure of competition in the 18th legislature, returning the image of a fluid, unstable and constantly moving system.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, there has been a revitalization of elite studies and of their role in the fate of contemporary societies. However, few of these studies have had the scope and depth of Richard Lachmann's theory, who had been developing his theory of elite conflict since the 1990s. In order to contribute to said theory, this article analyzes the case of Venezuela in the 1990s. This case was characterized by a cohesion of political elites that resisted democratizing State Reforms at the beginning of the decade, in the context of the delegitimization of the system of political democracy. Said elites were ultimately forced to give in on certain areas of the reforms, which favored an intensified conflict between them, which resulted in their defeat and the fall of the system of political democracy that began in 1958. By incorporating the context of a crisis of legitimation of democracy, the article's contribution to the theory of elite conflict focuses on the dynamics between cohesion, reforms, and elite conflict. Methodologically, the article is analytical and is based on well-established previous studies on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal elections between 2008 and 2019 saw a great of volatility in Quebec, with important consequences for election outcomes. The surge in New Democratic Party (NDP) support in Quebec led the party to official opposition, while Liberal gains in 2011 led the party to a majority government, and Bloc Québécois gains in 2019 helped to reduce the Liberals to a minority. To what extent was this volatility driven by voters switching parties and to what degree was it driven by voters entering and exiting the electorate? This article uses ecological inference based on riding-level data to examine the dynamics of party competition in Quebec from 2008 to 2019. We show that while voter mobilization mattered to volatility, vote switching was the important driver of changing party fortunes during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study the authors aim to add to the understanding of whether, and if so how, a change of electoral system affects factors such as voter turnout and the party system, and the authors' focus has been on changes that result in mixed electoral systems. They used three country cases (Japan, Italy, and New Zealand) to explore patterns in a before-and-after design. The findings suggest that a country cannot expect a significant effect on voter turnout if it decides to change its electoral system to a mixed system. Regarding party system fragmentation, the results show that the change of the electoral system in New Zealand from a plurality system to a mixed member proportional system had a clear and immediately positive effect on the party system. However, the results do not indicate that the changes of electoral systems in Japan and Italy have had any significant effect on the party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently conducted opinion polls on the support bases of political parties vary, but nevertheless emphasise significant decline in political support for the governing ANC, already ruling for 28 years. Since its peak of support in 1999 (at national level nearly 70% support, in other words a majority of more than two-thirds), a gradual decline in support for the ANC has been evident. In the municipal elections held in 2021 the ANC could mobilise only about 46% support across municipalities and provinces. Following this trend of gradual declining support, some of these polls indicate a decline in support for the ANC to as low as 37%, while others estimate it at 42%. Against the background of a rapidly changing political environment, driven by political, economic and social factors, the South African political scene reached a tipping point, with large demands arising with regard to, amongst other things, the consolidation of democratic values. The third decade of the democratic dispensation can be decisive for the consolidation of democratic values in South Africa. Regarding the desired consolidation of democratic values, the political situation has however changed to such an extent that the municipal election held in 2021 resulted in nearly 70 hung councils in which no party could secure an absolute majority. With the general election of 2024 lying in store, coalition politics and/or alternative forms of political collaboration will become a highly probable scenario at both national and a few provincial levels. Coalition politics is a relatively new phenomenon in the South African political scenario, which has only since the municipal election of 2016 been realised, initially in the Western Cape, with a few other exceptions across provinces. Coalition politics in all its forms requires a new set of political rules, holding far-reaching implications for the perpetuation of our relatively young democracy and political stability, increasingly causing new challenges. Numerous coalition governments are currently caught up in crisis situations or are confronted by patterns of political instability. Metropoles like the City of Johannesburg, City of Ekurhuleni, City of Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay metropole attest to such situations. It also seems to be the destiny of numerous local municipalities currently governed by minority coalitions. This research is focused upon coalition politics in the South African context; the challenges and opportunities, described as the art of the (im) possible. Focal points of this presentation include: general points of departure; the status of the constitutional democracy; political parties and party systems; the South African voting system; coalition politics, and evaluating perspectives. In a period of rapid political, economic and social change, and the accompanying challenges, politicians and political elites will have to master the "art" of coalition politics for the benefit of survival -- a challenge that is going to put huge demands to a democracy in the process of consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the rise and mobilizational dynamics of social democracy, employing data reported by the Swedish authorities on the distribution of voting eligibility, turnout and partisan vote in local elections during the 1910s at a high level of disaggregation (by narrow income segments and administrative units). In line with the existing literature, we show that electoral socialism depended on both the extension of the suffrage to its 'natural' electorate, that is, the urban working class, and the organizational capacity of trade unions and other civic associations. In addition, we show that socialist support was not uniform within the working class – even for a highly homogeneous society. Instead, the social-democratic vote was initially stronger among low- to middle-income workers, only expanding to poor voters later in time. We complement our local data with an interwar panel analysis of socialist vote and post-war survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological scaling methods have shown that behavioral traces in social platforms can be used to mine opinions at a massive scale. Current methods exploit one-dimensional left–right opinion scales, best suited for two-party socio-political systems and binary social divides such as those observed in the US. In this article, we introduce a new method to overcome limitations of existing methods by producing multidimensional network embeddings and align them with referential attitudinal for a few nodes. This allows us to infer a larger set of opinion dimensions from social graphs, embedding users in spaces where dimensions stand for indicators of several social dimensions including (in addition to left–right cleavages) attitudes towards elites, or ecology among many other issues. Our method does not rely on text data and is thus language-independent. We illustrate this approach approach on a Twitter follower network. Finally, we show how our method allows us to analyze the opinions shared within various communities of social networks. Our analyses show that communities of users that have extreme political opinions are also more homogeneous ideologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent is political fragmentation associated with changes in democracy? The article uses the European integration process of ten Central and East European democracies to argue that political fragmentation is distinctly related to changes in democracy, depending on whether it is the government or opposition that is fragmented. Moreover, this association is mitigated by EU conditionality in the integration process. The paper tests the argument through the use of time-series cross-sectional data. The findings illustrate the importance of opposition fragmentation as an essential factor in explaining changes in democracy. In conclusion, the article draws attention to the understudied literature on opposition fragmentation by highlighting the theoretical implications of the findings for comparative politics and European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has the consolidation of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the dominant party at the national level since the 2014 Lok Sabha election affected internal security outcomes in India? This question assumes particular significance because of the primacy accorded to the use of force in the BJP's counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy. Using sub-national data on insurgency-related fatalities from 2005–2021, I examine whether states where the BJP received the largest share of votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election subsequently experienced any significant changes in the pattern of fatalities. Implementing a difference-in-difference econometric specification, I show that the BJP states experienced a relatively sharper decline in security force fatalities from pre-2014 compared to non-BJP states. However, there was no such effect on civilian fatalities or the total number of insurgency-related incidents. Taken together, these findings show that the greater thrust towards militarism in COIN strategy under the BJP, has, paradoxically, increased the security of military/police personnel involved in COIN operations, without commensurate changes in the security of those whom they are mandated to defend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral stability has been viewed as an essential condition for the healthy functioning of representative democracy. However, there is little agreement in the literature about what shapes the stability of the electorate in general nor much attention paid to that of the Asian electorates in particular. We propose historical legacies, uniquely testable in Asia, as central determinants, but also test for conventional factors examined in other regions. By analyzing more than 150 elections in 19 post-WWII Asian democracies, we find that certain types of authoritarian (military or personalist) and colonial (non-British) legacies have a detrimental impact on the stabilization of the electorate, while some of the findings from other regions apply also to Asia. Our additional finding that such effects of historical legacies, particularly authoritarian interludes, are attenuated and cease to be significant with sufficient maturation of democracy, has important implications for the way party systems develop and democracies consolidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Political Science Studies / Studia Politologiczne is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent reforms to the Canadian Senate removed senators from the Liberal Party caucus and changed the appointment process to be more nonpartisan. This article asks: to what extent did the reforms affect legislative oversight in the Senate? By studying the Senate's legislative amendments, I find that the reformed Senate is more willing to amend bills than it was previously. The reforms led to sharp increases in the Senate's amendment rate, the number of amendments moved and the percentage of successful motions in amendment. In interviews, senators revealed that they see oversight differently following the reforms. Senators no longer have opportunities to advise the government in caucus, so they have begun using amendments to exercise oversight. This article concludes that the reforms shifted senators' understanding of their function of oversight, leading to a higher amendment rate and increased visible scrutiny of government by the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the nature of populism in the Czech Republic, which was until recently described as centrist and moderate. It uses an approach that views populism as associated with empty policy space: that is, with (previously) secondary issues on which the established parties have unclear positions. The empirical analyses presented in this article show that in the Czech Republic, where political conflict has traditionally been based on disputes over economic distribution, the migration crisis that started in 2014 increased the salience of ethnicity and gave rise to an ethnopopulist reaction that led to a transformation of the party system and the dimensionality of political conflict in the country. Ethnicity thus became linked with populism and, as a result, transformed the dimensionality of political conflict by adding another (ethnic) layer to the political conflict in the country. This article contributes to the discussion of populism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) by describing the transformation of the nature of populism based on the dimensionality of political conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For an electorate numbering under 21,000 persons, voters in the autonomous Åland islands are remarkably well represented. They vote in Finnish general elections, presidential elections and European Parliament elections; they vote for a 30-seat regional assembly, the Lagting; and they vote for one of the 16 municipal councils on the islands. For Lagting elections there is one MP for barely seven-hundred voters. This low MP-voter ratio, when taken together with open-list PR electoral rules enabling citizens to cast a personal vote, and a broad consensus over Åland's self-governing status, would appear to militate against the need for party representation. Yet Ålanders are today served by an institutionalised party system which, while reflecting Scandinavian influences, is distinctive in its own right. Accordingly, this report poses three basic questions: (i) When and why did an Åland party system emerge? (ii) To what extent does it resemble the classical 'Scandinavian party system model'? (iii) What does the most recent 2019 Lagting election indicate about the balance between personal representation and party representation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The law of Duverger posits that the single-member plurality electoral system favours the two-party system. The empirical tests of Duvergerian effects often rely on the effective number of parties as the most common measure of party system fragmentation. This study, proceeding from the notion that more focused measures of two-partyness could be of greater utility for this purpose, examines the build-up of two already existing, albeit underused, indices that are intended to operationalize the concept of the two-party system and introduces a new family of party-system indices for the purpose of cross-validation. The quantitative analysis performed on simulated and real-life datasets shows that the measures of two-partyness can improve the methods of inquiry in research on Duvergerian effects, and that some of the indices introduced in this study can serve as useful supplements to the toolkit of political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the evolution of ideological polarisation in the Spanish party system since 1979. We offer a reformulation to improve the index’s accuracy when measuring polarization and apply it to the 14 general elections held in the country since the approval of the current Constitution. The results show the development consisting of two separated periods of seven elections each, together with a clear increase in ideological polarisation since 2015, reaching an alltime high at the present time. The measurement of ideological polarisation is complemented with the volatility and electoral competition generated by the arrival of new parties. The most notable increases happened after critical elections, this is, elections in which a substantial and long-lasting changes in electoral aligning took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies whether the party system characteristics fragmentation and ideological polarization increase the density of institutional regulation in parliaments. It introduces a comprehensive time-series-cross-sectional dataset of standing orders in 15 Western European parliaments that allows studying how densely various fields of legislative activity such as lawmaking, controlling the government, and creating publicity were regulated over a period of more than 60 years. Descriptively, the data show increased regulation in all areas but also some variation between countries. Dynamic panel regression analyses for non-stationary time series find no systematic effect of fragmentation or polarization on the density of regulation indicating that large parts of legislative organization change for reasons unrelated to party system dynamics. We identify changes in the environment of legislatures such as increasing complexity and professionalization of politics, technological change, and Europeanization as potential drivers of such Pareto-efficient reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]