Suchergebnisse

This article uses a representative sample of elections held in 80 countries (1992–2012) for a statistical analysis of societal and institutional factors of party system nationalization. The analysis demonstrates that high degrees of political decentralization, such as in federations and devolved states, exert a strong negative effect on party system nationalization. However, in the long-term federalism can accommodate highly nationalized party systems. Another factor that strongly contributes to party system nationalization is a high quality of democracy. The degrees to which different varieties of electoral rules support party system nationalization are associated with a lack of incentives for cultivating the personal vote. Countries with large populations and societies divided along linguistic and/or religious lines tend to have party systems that are less nationalized, but these factors are not as important as institutional determinants. The impact of some of the factors is mitigated by party system fragmentation.

The existing measures of party system nationalization and territorial heterogeneity of electoral support, including the Gini-based system-level nationalization score and its complements, can be inappropriate in those research contexts where, as it is in the study of federations, the territorial structure of the state is a substantively important factor of political development rather than one of the possible levels of electoral data aggregation. This problem can be solved by using a normalized version of the Gini coefficient. Alternatively, it is possible to use a new measure, the index of party system nationalization proposed in this study. While both the normalized Gini-based index and the new measure fully satisfy all theory-inspired requirements and yield similar results, the new measure may be preferable because of its relative computational simplicity and intuitively easy understanding.

This article employs the Cox proportional hazards model to discover the factors of survival of 162 party systems from 1792 to 2009. In order to avoid the endogeneity problem, the analysis employs the level of democracy as a control variable. The impact of the overall level of party system fragmentation is found negligible, even though excessive fragmentation is conducive to a higher hazard of party system termination. More importantly, systems with close competition among leading parties – including two-party systems and systems with close competition among up to four parties – are more likely to survive across time. The article introduces a methodological innovation by disaggregating the effective number of parties into two components, the leading parties' balance and the residual fragmentation.

This article classifies the democratic party systems of the world by using the relative-size triangle, a bounded diagram that graphically represents information about seat distributions by party. In particular, the article solves identification problems stemming from the fact that party systems, as recurring patterns of party competition, involve systemic properties that are not reducible to the properties of individual party constellations. On this basis, 162 party systems that existed or continue to exist in the world's democracies from 1792 to 2009 are assigned to the predominant party, two-party and multiparty types, each of the types being divided into two subcategories. A new measure of party system fragmentation, the systemic effective number of parties, complements the resulting classification with a methodologically consistent assessment of the degrees of multipartism. On this basis, the article arrives at several empirical conclusions regarding the geographical/chronological spread of different party systems and their relative longevity. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]