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"Party Systems in Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.

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.

Introduction: party competition in Latin America -- 1 Patterns of programmatic party competition in Latin America -- Part I: Describing Programmatic Structuration: 2 Issues, ideologies, and partisan divides: imprints of programmatic structure in Latin American legislatures -- 3 Left-right semantics as a facilitator of programmatic structuring -- 4 Political representation in Latin America -- 5 Ideological cohesion of political parties in Latin America -- Part II: Causes and Correlates of Programmatic Party System Structuration: Explaining Cross-National Diversity -- 6 Long-term influences on the structuring of Latin American Party systems -- 7 Democratic politics and political economy since the 1980s: transforming the programmatic structure of Latin American party systems? -- 8 Programmatic structuration around religion and political regime -- 9 Programmatic structuration and democratic performance -- 10. Conclusion.