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Why are voters in some electoral constituencies able to successfully co-ordinate their balloting decisions on viable party offerings, while those in other constituencies are not? Prior work on voter co-ordination failures has focused on institutional and elite-level explanations. This article demonstrates that characteristics of the voting constituencies themselves – specifically their socio-demographic diversity – can play an important role in shaping voters' collective ability to co-ordinate around viable party offerings. It synthesizes theories of collective decision making from the field of organizational psychology with theories of institutions as incentive structures to argue that diversity inhibits collective co-ordination in some contexts, but not others. In so doing, the article offers a new causal mechanism that links diversity and district magnitude to party system size. The argument is tested using a cross-national analysis of tens of thousands of voters across lower house elections in twelve countries.

Scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude. However, no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society. Furthermore, the relationship between diversity and electoral rules, on one hand, and the effective number of parties, on the other hand, has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross-national comparative context. This article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross-district diversity. I argue that the extent of cross-district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district-level diversity and the effective number of parties. Support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies.

The aftermath of the Great Recessions has seen inequality in the U.S. and other developed nations increase to unprecedented levels. But how do parties on each side of the ideological spectrum react to inequality? In new research which examines political parties' election messages across 40 democracies, Joshua D. Potter and Margit Tavits find that parties on the left push economic messages during times of higher inequality, while those on the right tend to focus on values-based social issues when voters are especially religious or there is significant societal concern about immigration or ethnic fractionalization.

How do parties decide which issues to emphasize during electoral competition? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how parties of the left and of the right respond to economic inequality. Increasing inequality shifts the proportion of the population falling into lower socioeconomic categories, thereby increasing the size of the electoral constituency that is receptive toward leftist parties' redistributive economic appeals. In the face of rising inequality, then, leftist parties will emphasize economic issues in their manifestos. By contrast, the nonredistributive economic policies often espoused by rightist parties will not appeal to this burgeoning constituency. Rather, we argue, rightist parties will opt to emphasize values-based issues, especially in those cases where 'social demand' in the electorate for values-based representation is high. We find support for these relationships with hierarchical regression models that draw from data across hundreds of parties in a diverse set of the world's democracies. Adapted from the source document.

The comparative literature on party systems has convincingly demonstrated that electoral rules, social cleavages and their interaction can explain much of the cross-national variation in the size of party systems. This literature, however, has thus far ignored campaign finance laws. This article argues that various campaign finance laws exert more or less restrictive pressures on party competition. It develops a new theoretical concept, fund parity. The study demonstrates the positive relationship between fund parity and party system size and employs additional tests to supplement the regression analysis in order to account for potential endogeneity issues. The findings underscore an intuitive - but heretofore untested - relationship: increasing parity makes party competition more permissive and increases the size of the party system. Adapted from the source document.

The comparative literature on party systems has convincingly demonstrated that electoral rules, social cleavages and their interaction can explain much of the cross-national variation in the size of party systems. This literature, however, has thus far ignored campaign finance laws. This article argues that various campaign finance laws exert more or less restrictive pressures on party competition. It develops a new theoretical concept, fund parity. The study demonstrates the positive relationship between fund parity and party system size and employs additional tests to supplement the regression analysis in order to account for potential endogeneity issues. The findings underscore an intuitive – but heretofore untested – relationship: increasing parity makes party competition more permissive and increases the size of the party system.

ObjectivesUnder what circumstances are voters most likely to correctly situate political parties along a left‐right spatial continuum? Answering this question is profoundly important for our understanding of the spatial theory of party competition, which has typically generated empirically verifiable predictions about party‐level platform shifts, but fallen short when it comes to making predictions about voter‐level perceptions.Method. We use a multilevel cross‐national database of hundreds of thousands of voters in recent elections in Western and Eastern European democracies, and hierarchical linear modeling to test our hypotheses. Results. We demonstrate that the prevalence of Internet usage in a country systematically shapes individual voters' objective accuracy in their placements of parties' platforms on the left‐right spectrum. However, these effects accrue differently across certain populations of voters. Conclusion. The party placements of those individuals who self‐report as being ideologically extreme are affected more substantially by Internet prevalence than those of moderate voters.