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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze data from the Afrobarameter and a structured experiment on university students in Senegal. We find that although many Africans do not vote, they are politically active, and poor economic conditions positively affect participation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how much political parties move in the policy space and whether party characteristics distinguish among parties by movement. Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data were used to develop hypotheses that originate in both the traditional literature and spatial modeling literature and evaluate the hypotheses empirically. The literature on party characteristics is discussed, as well as the use of the CMP data.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between two types of signal, both of which are tied to electoral competition and the survival of party leaders. Using the Cox proportional hazard model, we analyze the relationship between changes in seat share and changes in policy position on the survival of over 200 party leaders representing 33 political parties from 10 parliamentary democracies. We find that regardless of the number of parties in the party system (whether two or five), changes in seat share have a large and highly significant effect on the duration of party leaders. When the change in seat share is positive under their tenure, party leaders survive longer, when it is negative their risk of removal increases. However, changes in policy position have no effect on party leader survival. As a result, we conclude that changes in seat share provide clear and compelling signals about a party leader's performance, whatever the party system in which competition takes place. Furthermore, we find evidence that the survival of party leaders varies with the clarity of the electoral signal. In systems where elections are not decisive; that is, more than one coalition government is possible, leaders may not be held as accountable for electoral performance as in winner take all systems. If we take the size of the governing coalition as a proxy for the decisiveness of the electoral contest, we find that the larger the coalition in which a leader's party participates, the lower the leader's risk of removal (whatever the change in seat share). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties modify their policy platforms in response to their electoral environment? We employ the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data, in two dimensions, to explore five possible decision rules parties may employ (see Budge 1994 and Laver 2005): Alternation (move first in one direction, then the other); Hunter (if win votes, move in same direction; if lose votes, move in opposite direction); Predator (move toward party with the largest vote share); Niche Predator (move toward closest neighboring party, our own proposed strategy) and Sticker (no party movement). We also evaluate whether parties learn which strategies are most effective in electoral competition. We find evidence that all strategies are employed and that parties progressively learn which strategies to abandon and which strategies to emphasize. Alternation, Hunter, and Sticker strategies appear to diminish over time as parties compete in more elections, leaving Predator and Niche Predator as the dominant strategies. The empirical analysis suggests that different strategies dominate different dimensions of political competition and that parties employ a mix of strategies rather than a single strategy. These findings contribute to the literature on party electoral strategies in three ways. First, the findings confirm and extend analyses of party electoral strategies. Second, the findings suggest that parties that survive electoral competition do so by learning appropriate electoral strategies. And third, different dimensions of electoral competition give rise to different electoral strategies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data for the party systems of twenty parliamentary democracies for the post-WWII period, we examine party positions along the two policy dimensions most commonly identified in empirical studies, economic policy and social policy. We present two main findings. First, as predicted by Downs (1957) and Cox (1990), we find that the ideological distance between parties in a party system is greater in multi-party systems than in two-party systems. Indeed, we find that divergence increases as the number of parties increases. Second, we find that in multi-party systems (systems with 3 or more parties), the further parties are located from the position of the median voter, the fewer votes they receive, but in two-party systems, no systematic relationship exists between proximity to the median voter and vote share, suggesting that parties in two-party systems can adjust their policy positions significantly without penalty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtually all of the work on party systems and change in party systems has been framed by two seminal works, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and Sartori (1976). The frames emphasize the freezing (or lack thereof) of ideological cleavages and categorize party systems in terms of number of parties and ideological distance between parties. In this article, we argue that these frames overlook (or focus on only one dimension of) important features of both stability and change in party systems: the degree of continuity of the political parties themselves and their movement in the ideological space. We believe that parties are adaptive organizations that respond to their environment and that the most important feature of parties' environment is the degree of competition. We argue that, as competition among parties increases, their movement in the ideological space increases, thereby promoting stability in the parties themselves. As competition decreases, dominant parties are less responsive to the changing political environment and move less in the ideological space, providing openings to new parties with new issues and the potential displacement of the dominant party. We test our hypotheses on three dependent variables, the level of the non-established party vote, the number of new parties, and the movement of parties in the policy space. The evidence from 20 parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998 supports our contentions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to test the effect that a party's electoral performance has on the duration of its party leader in his or her post. A survival analysis, specifically the Cox proportional hazard model, was used to determine the effect. It suggests that a party leader's risk of removal increases as his or her party's seat share decreases. The analyses of the aforementioned test focuses on those parties with an appreciable legislative presence since 1945 in the parliamentary systems of Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand.

This paper reviews the recent debate on how best to measure party ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the conditions under which the policy positions of vote-maximizing political parties converge to that of the median voter, and under what conditions do they diverge from this position. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]