Try Federalism

Polarization is a key characteristic of party systems, but scholars disagree about how polarization relates to the number of parties in a system. Different authors find positive, negative, or null relationships. I claim that when polarization is measured using the weighted standard deviation of standardized party positions, seat-level polarization is equal to NS−112+NS−1, where NS is the effective number of seat-winning parties. This relationship is what one would expect if parties were drawn randomly from a super-population with an effective sample size somewhere between the effective and raw number of parties. I test this claim using multiple datasets which report party positions and seat shares, before extending my analysis to consider vote-level polarization, the range of positions, and polarization in presidential and parliamentary regimes. My work extends the Taageperaan research agenda of building interlocking networks of equations relating key quantities of electoral and party systems.

Party systems, that is, the number and the size of all the parties within a country, can vary greatly across countries. I conduct a principal component analysis on a party seat share dataset of 17 advanced democracies from 1970 to 2013 to reduce the dimensionality of the data. I find that the most important dimensions that differentiate party systems are: “the size of the biggest two parties” and the level of “competition between the two biggest parties.” I use the results to compare the changes in electoral and legislative party systems. I also juxtapose the results to previous party system typologies and party system size measures. I find that typologies sort countries into categories based on variation along both dimensions. On the other hand, most of the current political science literature use measures (e.g., the effective number of parties) that are correlated with the first dimension. I suggest that instead of these, indices that measure the opposition structure and competition could be used to explore problems pertaining to the competitiveness of the party systems.

Federal states may encounter difficulties in applying international treaties on matters constitutionally committed to their constituent units. In such cases a federal state may not be able to join the treaty without some accommodation either by its constituent units or other parties to the treaty. There are certain methods by which these problems can be reduced: federal state clauses, territorial units clauses, and federalism reservations. Some treaties may include a federal state clause to the effect that limits the scope of treaty’s obligations to those that federal state’s government has constitutional authority to assume. Another solution is to include a territorial units clause where the treaty may apply to some of a state’s constituent units but not others. Several federal states have made reservations to limit their obligations to those areas of legislative jurisdiction that the federal government has assumed. On occasion, other states have objected to such reservations. Alternatively, a federal state may issue a federal declaration to explain how federalism affects its implementation of the treaty. Unitary states tend to resist the federal state clause and the territorial units clause because they create an imbalance between rights and obligations of the contracting federal and unitary states. Although such clauses are not popular with unitary states, they do make it that much easier for federations to become parties. Such clauses are a compromise between the interest of unitary and federal states. Domestic law provides no excuse for a failure to fully implement international treaty obligations. In international law, if the constituent units fail to comply, it is the federal government that is liable for the failure to properly implement the treaty.

The purpose of the present article is to analyze the electoral returns of the Kazakhstani elections held in the 1995-2021 period to estimate both the static (such as frag-mentation) and the dynamic properties (fluidity) of the Kazakhstani party system. In addition to estimating the fragmentation and the instability of the party system resulting from parlia-mentary elections, the paper explores the relationship between the static properties of a party system, such as the level of party system fragmentation, and its dynamic properties, such as the level of fluidity of the party system. By doing so, the article reveals that the decrease in the level of fragmentation, measured on the basis of Rae’s index of fractionalization and Laakso and Taagepera’s Effective Number of Parties, was responsible for the growing insta-bility (fluidity) of the Kazakhstani party system.

Quantitative Aspect of Parliamentary Elections in Serbia 2012–2023: Effective Number of Parties and Fragmentation of Party System

Nationwide electoral thresholds (NETs) are known to secure a parliamentary majority for the largest party, reduce party system fragmentation, and prevent extreme, minor, or non-core group parties from entering parliament. By comparing Greece and Turkey, which have applied NETs since 1993 and 1983 respectively, this article investigates why some of these aims have not been achieved. Using time-series data since 1950, we show that neither country needed to introduce NETs to establish single-party governments. Rather, they were implemented primarily to prevent non-core groups from entering parliament as a party. This caused disproportional legislative representation, especially in Turkey. Although Turkey’s NET initially reduced the raw number of parties contesting elections, this effect weakened in the long run and, in contrast to the literature, increased party system fragmentation. Finally, extreme parties have benefitted from Greece’s fragmented party system since 2012 whereas electoral engineering in Turkey has failed to prevent non-core groups from passing the electoral threshold.

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.

Empirical researchers studying party systems often struggle with the question of how to count parties. Indexes of party system fragmentation used to address this problem (e.g., the effective number of parties) have a fundamental shortcoming: since the same index value may represent very different party systems, they are impossible to interpret and may lead to erroneous inference. We offer a novel approach to this problem: instead of focusing on index measures, we develop a model that predicts theentire distributionof party vote-shares and, thus, does not require any index measure. First, a model of party counts predicts the number of parties. Second, a set of multivariatetmodels predicts party vote-shares. Compared to the standard index-based approach, our approach helps to avoid inferential errors and, in addition, yields a much richer set of insights into the variation of party systems. For illustration, we apply the model on two data sets. Our analyses call into question the conclusions one would arrive at by the index-based approach. Software is provided to implement the proposed model.

The aim of this paper is to explore and understand the Albanian Party System. The analysis will cover the period from the collapse of the communist regime in 1991 until 2014. It will try to investigate what forces drive the battle of the parties, what cleavages 'divide' society and consequently the party system as well as which are the parties that count the most. in order to assess this, the paper will focus on the parliamentary parties and will relay on various theoretical concepts of the contemporary literature on political parties. First it will draw on Sartori's concept of 'relevance' in order to understand whether all the parliamentary parties over the course of twenty four years of pluralism are important or not and what weight do they have. Then it will use the Laakso - Taagepera index of the Effective Number of Parties to understand how power is distributed within the parliament.

This article overviews and seeks to explain the processes of party system formation in the post-Soviet Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) by focusing on a crucial party-system property, fragmentation. The analysis reveals that to a much greater extent than in democracies, where party systems are largely shaped by societal factors, the level of party system fragmentation in autocracies is determined by the scope of presidential powers, as entrenched in the formal institutional order and reflected in the national constitution. The level of authoritarianism is largely inconsequential for party system fragmentation, while the role of electoral rules is secondary. Institutionally weak and institutionally strong autocratic presidents have a preference for fragmented party systems, while presidents with an intermediate range of powers seek and obtain low levels of party system fragmentation.

This chapter examines the empirical relationship between electoral systems, party system characteristics, cabinet stability and the fate of pluralist democracy in interwar Europe. Its main objective is to test basic notions in a literature which has been characterized by Lawrence Mayer (1980b: 335) as follows: The collapse of parliamentary democracies in Europe prior to World War II generated a search for the internal weakness of such systems. Out of this search came a suggestion from several quarters that multiparty parliamentary democracies were more prone to cabinet instability than were two-party systems. Parliamentary democracies, beset with such cabinet instability, cannot govern effectively. Therefore, it was suggested, such unstable systems were readily replaced by more authoritarian political regimes that appeared better able to provide for the efficient functioning of that system. KeywordsElectoral SystemParty SystemProportional RepresentationParliamentary DemocracyInterwar PeriodThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The topic of electoral volatility was not at the center of academic work in Latin America until Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully’s seminal 1995 work Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium). Preceding analyses primarily focused on explaining the breakdown of democratic politics in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. Conventional wisdom that departed from the classic work of Sartori in Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), maintained that stable party systems are crucial for the durability of democracies, focusing his attention on aspects such as party system polarization and fragmentation. Mainwaring and Scully shift the discussion, arguing that previous literature on the region neglected and inadequately conceptualized an equally important property of party systems: their level of their institutionalization. According to Mainwaring and Scully, party system institutionalization (PSI) is formed by four different dimensions. The first is stability in the patterns of party competition. Thus, institutionalized party systems are those in which actors develop expectations, orientations, and behavior based on the premise that practices and organizations will prevail into the foreseeable future. Mainwaring’s 2018 work, Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), argues that this is the only relevant dimension in PSI, while considering that the other three are just underpinnings that facilitate it. So according to this work, an institutionalized party system is the one in which a stable set of parties interacts regularly in stable ways. This stability of interparty competition is traditionally measured with the Pedersen volatility index, a comprehensive measure of the net systematic shift in levels of electoral support for parties across elections. As volatility is negatively correlated with this important dimension of party system institutionalization, conventional wisdom holds that political representation deteriorates when there is persistent high volatility. To this debate, the well-cited 2006 article by Mainwaring and Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization” (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), adds the idea that this lack of stability in the patterns of competition in party systems, measured by electoral volatility, is a typical characteristic of new and developing democracies. According to that study, the most important defining characteristic of party systems in less developed countries is captured by their lack of institutionalization, in other words, the amount of electoral volatility in their party systems. Since the publication of these three contributions, the debate on party system dynamics in the region has focused on cross-national levels of electoral volatility, their relationship with other indicators of party system stability, and their consequences for democratic quality and performance, while also broadening the analysis to Europe.

We combine consideration of Duverger’s Law (Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state. London: Methuen, 1954) with Demsetz’s (J Law Econ 11:55–65, 1968) theory of natural monopoly to provide a novel perspective on the meaning and measurement of electoral competitiveness in a single member district, plurality rule electoral system. In the Duverger-Demsetz view we develop, the degree of competition is determined by the contestability of elections. Contestability declines with party fragmentation, and so an increase in the effective number of parties above the long run level of 2 predicted by Duverger’s ‘Law’ for plurality based single seat elections signals a decline in competitiveness. This argument runs contrary to the view, sometimes expressed in empirical studies of elections and public policy, that more candidates or parties, each with a smaller vote share reflects a more competitive environment. Using the history of the Canadian parliamentary system, we provide qualified support for the Duverger-Demsetz perspective by studying the relationship between the concentration of vote shares and a new index of electoral contestability. Extension of the argument to proportional electoral systems is also considered.

Taking into proper account the geographic distribution of ethnic groups and the operation of electoral systems within individual countries reveals that the impact of ethnic diversity and electoral systems on the number of parties has been underestimated. Contrary to earlier findings, this study reveals that ethnic diversity spurs party proliferation in countries with both majoritarian and proportional electoral systems, though the effect is stronger in the latter. The insights gained here provide a theoretically derived measure of ethnic diversity that is useful for estimating its effect on specifically political phenomena and generating an improved holistic measure of the impact of electoral systems. More crucially, the results indicate that electoral system designers have a greater capacity to structure electoral outcomes. The results rely on multivariate models created using a new database with election results from 1990 through 2011 in sixty-five free democracies.

E LECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS character electoral districts, election mechanisms, and proportion votes needed to win have been credited with influencing party systems in various ways. Bi-partyism generally is related to use single-member district, plurality election system (SMD/PE). While some assert that party dualism is caused, or at least reinforced, by use this election system, others simply note that bi-partyism is associated or coexistent with SMD/PE. Multi-partyism is held to be related similarly to use multi-member district, proportional representation election system (MMD/PR). Two eminent students party systems Schattschneider and Duverger appear to have been especially influential in securing acceptance for these interpretations. Schattschneider, writing in 1942 about Party Government, left no doubt that to his mind party system is direct consequence American election system, or system representation, explaining that widespread use in this country SMD/PE operates to exaggerate representation winning party and to give second party a monopoly opposition by discriminating harshly against third parties.' Duverger, on basis a much broader survey party systems, came to a similar set conclusions in his Political Parties.2 Saying that the party system and electoral system are two realities that are indissolubly linked, he offers formulae that MMD/PR encourages multi-partyism while SMD/PE encourages two-partyism. In oft-quoted statement, Duverger writes that the simplemajority single-ballot system favors two-party system. Of all hypotheses that have been defined in this book, this approaches most nearly perhaps a true sociological law. An almost complete correlation is observable between simplemajority single-ballot system and two-party system; dualist countries use simple-majority vote and simple-majority vote countries are dualist. He persists by stating that SMD/PE is capable maintaining established dualism in spite schisms in old and birth new parties and of re-establishing dualism when it has been destroyed by appearance a third party. Similarly Duverger asserts that MMD/PR favors multi-partyism, its multiplicative effect being such that it puts an end to any tendency toward a two-party system... . Cautions have been raised against unqualified acceptance association SMD/PE with two-party systems. Wildavsky has voiced criticisms and doubts on