Economic reforms face a collective action problem: they trigger the reaction of groups that expect significant losses, while the anticipated gains are often dispersed across the population and too uncertain to animate strong popular support. This pattern may exhibit different characteristics in...

The purpose of this paper is to explore in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of inter-party...

The term "party system", explained Giovanni Sartori, refers to the pattern of interactions among major parties. That pattern can be represented as a type and treated as a proper unit of analysis. When "party system" is defined in this way, it becomes clear that the scholarship lacks a direct...

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to...

This paper explores the effect of party system institutionalization on the reliance of tax systems on the personal income tax. As a first step, the paper re-examines the relationship between party system institutionalization and taxation patterns employing the recently launched Government...

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. We conduct laboratory experiments to study whether alternative voting procedures yield a two-party system as well. Plurality Voting is compared with Approval Voting and Dual Voting, both of...

Is politics a lucrative business? The question is approached in this paper, as one of few to quantify the monetary returns to holding political office in a typical developed democracy where parties are the main political actors. By applying a difference-in-difference setting with a carefully...

We study a dynamic model of elections where many parties may enter or exit political competition. At each election a new political leadership arrives for each party. The leadership cannot choose the party's platform (ideological identities are fixed) but must decide whether or not to contest the...

This research analyzes the nationalization of Russian party system and presidential candidates from 1996 till 2018 based on the index of nationalization, coefficient of variation, and Euclidean distance, proposing the new method of assessing the aforementioned measurements. The method includes...