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Spatial characterizations of agents’ preferences lie at the heart of many theories of political competition. These give rise to explicitly dimensional interpretations. Parties define and differentiate themselves in terms of substantive policy issues, and the configuration of such issues that is required for a good description of political competition affects how we think substantively about the underlying political space in which parties compete. For this reason a great deal of activity in political science consists of estimating such configurations in particular real settings. We focus on three main issues in this article. First, we discuss the nature of political differences and from this construct an interpretation of the dimensionality of the political space needed to describe a given real setting, underscoring the essentially metaphorical and instrumental use of this concept. Second, we contrast ex ante and ex post interpretations of this dimensionality. Third, we illustrate potential hazards arising from the purely inductive estimation of political spaces using a spatial example from the physical world and political competition in the European Parliament as a political example. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores an unexpectedly hard question for representative democracy, which is usually thought to be enhanced when political parties compete with each other for the support of voters in free and fair elections. Defining optimal representation in terms of the probability that a voter will find a party to support at election time that promotes a policy position close to his/her ideal point, it transpires that vote-seeking parties do not deliver optimal representation. They tend to locate ‘too close’ to the centroid of voter ideal points to minimize the aggregate distance between party positions and voter ideal points. Instead, optimal representation in this sense will be delivered if parties set policy positions using ‘aggregator’ rules, which seek to represent the views of current party supporters, but not to attract new supporters. One policy implication is that the representativeness of inter-party politics is increased by enhancing the representativeness of intra-party politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research note report the results of an expert survey of party policy positions and the relative importance of different cabinet portfolios in Japan at the time of the 1996 general election. The survey replicates earlier expert surveys conducted in a wide range of democratic systems by Laver and Hunt (1992), but uses a survey form adapted to the specific Japanese context, translated into Japanese, and administered from a Japanese academic institution. The results provide raw data that can be used as input to a range of different models of party competition and government formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a number of theories that have been used to analyse government formation in West European parliamentary democracies and applies them to the government formation process in Japan after the 1996 general election. These models underline the continuing importance of the LDP in the government formation process, despite the loss of its overall majority. The application of government formation models to the Japanese case also highlights the weakness of the typical assumption that sees parties as unitary actors. The paper thus concludes with some speculations as to how this assumption might usefully be relaxed to incorporate party factions, splits and fusions and thereby generate more dynamic models of the making and breaking of governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 maximization. Some of the implications of integrating the two facets of party competition are explored, with special attention to endogeneous changes in party systems produced as part of the process of competition. Such changes may operate in different directions in different parts of the system and the consequent damping effect may contribute to the relative stability of party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]