Gives a comprehensive overview of national elections and referendums in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and South Asia. For all relevant states, the legal provisions on suffrage as well as parliamentary and presidential electoral systems are analysed in both a historical and a comparative manner. Investigates the effects of elections and electoral systems on the development of the political regimes. The concluding section summarizes the context‐specific availability and reliability of official electoral statistics. The appendix presents the basic features of the parliamentary electoral systems currently applied in the 22 states of the three regions.

After two decades of parliamentary democracy, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have quite different records of government stability. At the same time there continues to be turbulent fluctuation within the individual countries. To explain this variation, the authors draw on characteristics of parties and party systems for 138 governments in 12 CEE countries. The analysis is structured by two distinct logics that underlie the effect of party-related attributes on government survival: the logic of internal friction within the government and the logic of external pressure from the opposition. The authors argue that in the “difficult” contexts of postcommunist party systems, these two logics do not operate independently of each other. Instead, they suggest that standard theory needs to be revised to account for the interactions of government and opposition characteristics. Their model of these interactions not only includes standard numeric and ideological variables but also integrates specificities of the postcommunist context: the regime divide and the low degree of party-system consolidation. Quantitative and qualitative findings demonstrate that government stability in CEE is interactively determined by whole constellations of party attributes.

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Administrative reorganization has become widespread practice in modern democracies. Various case studies highlight the relevance of political ideology for bureaucratic contraction, others the role of socioeconomic pressure and institutional constraints. We examine these explanations in a study of the German Länder, which have substantially contracted their bureaucracies since the 1990s. Quantitative analysis of a novel data set of 479 ministerial departments in 13 Länder over two decades suggests that the ideological complexion of governments is a stronger predictor of administrative reform than socioeconomic pressure or institutional constraints. Moreover, interaction models show how socioeconomic and institutional variables condition the effect of ideology.

Government formation in multi-party democracies is notoriously ridden with information uncertainty. Uncertainty is aggravated when new parties enter parliament, which generally suggests a ‘newcomer handicap’ in government formation. However, relegating newcomers to the opposition comes with uncertainty in its own right, which suggests immediate cabinet participation as new leaders seize the opportunity and established parties pursue containment. We explore elite responses to this strategic problem in the postcommunist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) where new parties often gain parliamentary representation. Even in CEE, a newcomer handicap in government formation is apparent, controlling for other detrimental party attributes. However, this applies to small newcomers only. For larger parties the handicap turns into a bonus, an effect only qualified once the newcomer outnumbers its competitors. Either way, newness-induced uncertainty thus intensifies the strategic rationale of government formation. As party systems become more volatile, these findings are relevant beyond CEE.