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The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing or right-wing positions on immigration and social morality. The central argument is that left/right disagreement is asymmetrical: leftists and rightists derive from different sources, and thus structure in different ways, their opinions about policy. Drawing on evidence from Benoit and Laver's (2006) survey of experts about the policy positions of political parties, the results of the empirical analysis indicate that party policy on the economic, social and immigration dimensions are bound together by parties on the left, but not by parties on the right. The article concludes with an outline of the potential implications of left/right asymmetry for unified theories of party competition. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

We propose a framework for analysing party elite perceptions of voting behaviour based on four party competition and voting behaviour models: the Downsian proximity, saliency, competence and directional models. We analyse whether and to what extent party elite perceptions support these theories of party competition and voting behaviour. Empirical analysis is based solely on internal party documents from two Swedish parties, the Social Democrats and the Conservatives, from 1964 to 1988/1991. We demonstrate that elements of all four party competition models have characterized Swedish party elite thinking and reasoning about voting behaviour in recent decades. Discussion in the Social Democratic elite was most in line with Downs' model. Until the mid-1970s, Downs' model tended to be combined with the competence model and thereafter with the saliency model. The Conservative elite clearly favoured the salience and competence models until the early 1970s and the saliency and Downs' models since then. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The article applies and develops Katz and Mair's 'cartel party' thesis to the Russian case. Challenging the accepted characterization of the Russian party system as 'hegemonic', the article contends that this underplays the systemic importance of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its collusion with pro-Kremlin parties in the fields of electoral and party reform. By applying the concepts of cartelization to the Russian case, it appears that the intersection of state and party goes beyond simply the 'top-down' establishment of political parties towards a party system in which there is inter-party collusion around a strong state-based regime. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

A vast literature suggests that voters in new democracies 'sell' their vote to patrons providing private or small-scale club goods, or, alternatively, that such goods are distributed along ethnic lines to reinforce ethnic voting. In either case the outcome is undermining democratic accountability. This study finds that citizens in one new democracy -- Ghana -- expect (and get) the patronage but at the same time engage in economic voting. Eighty-five percent of citizens first and foremost expect their legislators to supply private or small-scale 'club' goods. This acts as a strong incentive for politicians to actually supply such goods, which is confirmed by participants' observational data and more than 250 interviews conducted by the author. Despite this, citizens do not vote based on how well or how poorly incumbent MPs provide clientelistic goods. A multivariate analysis reveals that voting for the opposition or the incumbent is determined by evaluations of the state of the national economy and of the government's policies. What the literature has portrayed as an 'either-or' is 'both', and this is perfectly rational: Extract as much as one can in terms of private and small club goods but vote based on economic factors. The literature suggests that clientelism dominates elections in newer democracies and thus undermines democracy. The findings from this study suggest that while distribution of clientelistic goods is common, this does not necessarily undermine the mechanism of democratic accountability in elections. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Most existing studies of leadership effects on electoral success employ survey data only. This time-series study combines a content analysis of media appearances of the right-wing populist leader Geert Wilders in 2006 with his party's popularity in the polls. The content analysis focuses on three aspects of the media coverage: (1) visibility, (2) whether he articulates a vision for the future, and (3) his self-confidence. Wilders was selected because as a leader without a party he represents the most likely case to find media effects. Var-analysis showed a significant positive effect of 'vision' on media attention, and a negative effect of popularity in the polls on visibility in the media. Yet, the study finds little support for the 'leadership hypothesis', and thus contributes to literature showing that the effects of the representation of political leaders in the media are more limited than often assumed. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In this article we present a content analysis framework for textual analysis of programmatic documents with the goal of identifying party positions on the ethnic dimension of political competition. The proposed approach allows for evaluation and comparison of how party systems in multi-ethnic states process ethno-cultural claims and demands. Our method of content analysis of party programmatic texts provides adequate granularity by which to capture the subtleties of ethno-cultural political rhetoric. It also addresses some of the misclassification and measurement problems raised in the literature with respect to the dominant Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) approach to textual analysis. We demonstrate how estimates generated by our method for human-based coding constitute an improvement on the CMP's estimates of party positions on ethno-cultural issues. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model is tested with time series data and event history analysis on the sizes of the public policy agenda and the political party system in the Netherlands, an extreme case of large district magnitude given its single national district. Change in the slack of the issue agenda influences the births and deaths of political parties, a result that may also have implications for cases of lower district magnitude. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

It is commonplace to see political parties as fundamentally constrained by public opinion. By contrast, this paper argues that party competition amplifies mass ideological polarization over public policy. Specifically, the investigation concerns the relationship between mass-level ideology and ethnic exclusionism (the call for harsh immigration policies). As party competition intensifies, this relationship strengthens. The party competition thesis is tested by performing a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden. Unlike their Danish counterparts, Swedish political parties have, most of the time, refused to take opposed stands on immigration policy. In effect, the empirical data show that the individual-level association between self-reported ideology and ethnic exclusionism is considerably stronger in Denmark than in Sweden. To investigate the party competition effect in depth, both longitudinal analyses and a cross-sectional analysis are performed. Data cover the period 1990-2008. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]