Electoral Systems, Party Systems: Lijphart and Beyond

In: Party politics: an international journal for the study of political parties and political organizations, Band 13, Heft 6, S. 721-740

Abstract

The article provides a systematic test of the consequences of electoral rules for the format of party systems and the frequency of single-party majority cabinets. The test is based on Lijphart's 1994 dataset (extended to 1 November 2002), but excludes some of his cases and introduces an additional indicator of number of parties. Thanks to these changes in research design, the variance explained by multivariate regression is much higher than Lijphart's results, especially in respect of elective parties. However, the post-1990 data reflect a decline in the predictive power of the main independent variable (`effective' threshold). In explaining this decline, the author argues that account should be taken of a previously neglected factor, i.e. the growing destructuration of Western parties and party systems since the late 1980s. Indeed, entering an indicator of such a process into regressions (total net volatility) compensates for all the threshold's lost explanatory power, thus suggesting that structural consolidation is a crucial condition for the operation of electoral systems.