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"After the gradual slowing down of the "third wave of democratization," electoral authoritarianism is rapidly emerging as a dominant form of contemporary autocracy. Political parties play a key role within the political and institutional structures of electoral autocracies. Pro-regime parties provide the dictatorial executive with electoral and legislative tools of sustaining power. At the same time, permitted opposition parties, while normally incapable of challenging the regime, are important for regime sustainability because they perform such vital functions as co-opting actual or potential opposition groups, facilitating power-sharing, and mobilizing electoral participation. The interactions among the dominant parties and the permitted opposition parties, if displaying sustainable cross-temporal patterns, constitute authoritarian party systems. Authoritarian Party Systems provides a theoretical discussion of electoral authoritarianism with special reference to authoritarian party systems; a methodological overview of party system research with special reference to the problems caused by the authoritarian nature of the observed party systems; a comprehensive cross-regional and historical overview of authoritarian party systems; a quantitative analysis of their structural characteristics, including fragmentation, party system format, volatility, and nationalization; and in-depth discussions of the political regime determinants of authoritarian party systems and of the interplay between party systems and other components of the authoritarian institutional order. Quantitative analysis has been performed on an original database comprising cases of party-structured authoritarian regimes between 1945-2019. This content of the book is illustrated by case studies drawn from across the spectrum of contemporary authoritarian regimes"--

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.

Distributing "raw" data among types or classes is a necessary and illuminating part of the process of research and discovery in any science, particularly in the early stages of the latter's development. But it produces fruitful results only if the types or classes make sense, which they will just to the extent that, inter alia, the variables we fix upon in defining them are the significant ones (for the purpose in view, of course), and that the classes (a) exhaust the phenomena under consideration, and (b) do not overlap.One of the most elementary procedures used in dealing with the raw data of political conflict is that which, taking its departure from the notion of "party systems," seeks to assign each observed instance to one or another of three types: the "one-party system," the "two-party system," and the "multiple-party system." All party systems, it is assumed, belong as a matter of course to one of the three, so that one of the researcher's first tasks in studying the phenomena of party conflict in a given political situation is to find out with which one of the three types he is dealing. Until he has done this—so runs the tacit premise—he does not have his problem in manageable shape.

Examined are equilibria in multi- & two-party political systems. Drawing on the work of Anthony Downs (An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York: Harper & Row, 1957), a rational-choice model of governmental decision making is presented that has a one-dimensional policy space for the positions of parties & voters, & assumes an arbitrary continuous density of voters, voters for the nearest party, & parties that try to maximize the number of votes. Sufficient & necessary conditions for equilibria are given, from which it is deduced that for systems with a large number of parties, equilibria are rare unless the density of voters is uniform. 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 10 References. Adapted from the source document.