Parties and Party Leaders

Israeli Parties and Party Leaders on Facebook during the 2013 Election Campaign

During the 2013 elections in Israel one of the major methods of interaction of the political parties and their leaders with potential voters was through their Facebook pages. These pages were followed for 50 days preceding the elections. For each page, 30% of the posts on the page were analyzed in terms of their rhetoric and subject. The largest number of the analyzed posts was intended for bon...

Vote Trading With and Without Party Leaders

Two groups of voters of known sizes disagree over a single binary decision to be taken by simple majority. Individuals have different, privately observed intensities of preferences and before voting can buy or sell votes among themselves for money. We study, theoretically and experimentally, the implication of such trading for outcomes and welfare when trades are coordinated by the two group le...

Continuities and Changes in Party Positions Towards Europe in Italian Parties: An Examination of Parties’ Manifestos

Counting parties and identifying dominant party systems in Africa

By most definitions, the third wave of democratisation has given rise to dominant parties and dominant party systems in Africa. The effective number of parties, the most widely used method to count parties, does not adequately capture this fact. An analysis of 59 election results in 18 sub-Saharan African countries shows that classifications of party systems on the basis of the effective number...

Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973–2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly eng...