Suchergebnisse

Institutional Design and Party Government in Post-Communist Europe examines the institutional foundations of coalition government in the 10 post-communist democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, arguing that differences in the arrangement of political institutions systematically explain variations in patterns of multi-party government.

chapter 1 Introduction -- chapter 2 Majority parliaments, majority governments: Party politics before 1989 -- chapter 3 Elections without winners -- chapter 4 The puzzle of minority governments in the Lok Sabha (co-written with Bernard Grofman) -- chapter 5 The view from the states -- chapter 6 Further implications of elusive majorities, and concluding thoughts.

This book offers an explanation for the recurrence of hung parliaments and minority governments in India. The Indian case study€provides lessons for the role of the centre in multiparty electoral and parliamentary competition and the political consequences of the first-past-the-post electoral system throughout the world.

This article analyzes the 2018 local elections in Jerusalem, the contested capital of the State of Israel. These elections were unique in terms of their level of competitiveness and fragmentation as well as producing a highly divided local government in the wake of the incumbent mayor's, Nir Barkat's, decision to leave the local political scene and enter national politics. While his party has no representation in city council, the new mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, built a broadly based new coalition that includes all parties in the council except for Hitorerut, the party that won the most seats and whose mayoral candidate, Ofer Berkovitch, was the runner-up to Lion. With the exception of the ultra-orthodox parties, national political parties that sought to interfere with the local electoral process to promote their candidates and lists by and large failed. Therefore, the governance of the city of Jerusalem once again fell under the control of the ultra-orthodox majority. Furthermore, even though the Arab population of East Jerusalem largely continued its traditional abstention from the electoral process, there was some evidence to suggest that a slight shift was taking place in that community in favor of participating in the institutional process of municipal government and democracy.

In January 2011, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak issued a surprising announcement to take four other members of his Labor Party's Knesset faction with himself to set up a new political party, Haatzmaut (Independence). The conditions under which this split took place illustrate the ways in which the Israeli anti-defection law, passed in the 12th Knesset, incentivizes the behavior of elected legislators who seek to exit from the party that they were elected to represent. This article shows that the anti-defection law cannot keep a legislative party together that suffers from weak internal cohesion. In fact, by imposing numerical criterion (1/3) on prospective party switchers, the anti-defection law prolongs internal disunity, thereby further weakening an already low level of cohesion.