A paradox in the comparative literature on electoral systems is that one of the most common systems in Europe – flexible-list proportional representation systems – may be the least understood. Any study of flexible-list systems must start by acknowledging a puzzle: why candidates spend time and effort striving to win preference votes when typically these votes make no difference between election and defeat. Offering the first comprehensive multi-country test of this key puzzle, we provide evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia that parties will promote to better list ranks in the next election those candidates who are successful at winning preference votes, thereby improving their prospects of election in the longer term and incentivizing them to cultivate personal reputations. Our findings have important implications for party scholars and practitioners when designing, or reforming, political institutions.

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The study analyzes the formal powers of current European monarchs, and examines their actual use. We investigate the royal prerogatives of monarchs from ten European nations: Belgium, Denmark, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The text deals with four powers – legislative initiative, royal assent/veto, selection/appointment of the prime minister and dissolution of parliament. The constitutional power is described first; its real use in the period of 1990–2012 is then examined. At the end, a comparison of every single prerogative is carried out, conclusions about the actual position of monarchs in current European political systems are drawn, and a tentative answer to questions concerning the future of kings, princes, and grand dukes serving as heads of state in European countries is suggested.

This article is based on a top-down approach to investigating political interactions between parties and voters and introduces the policy-space perspective into this approach. Its basic premise is as follows: through the application of categories of the proximity/distance of political actors, confl icts latently or manifestly present in a party system can be represented in the policy space. Mapping the policy space traces these relationships and helps to answer the question: What are the positions of political parties on the selected political topics? After providing an overview of existing scholarship on policy-space perspective in Czech politics, the article introduces and discusses a substantive and methodological decision that must be made in this type of research. The empirical part of the article replicates key aspects of Kenneth Benoit's and Michael Laver's study mapping policy spaces in modern democracies. The article employs as yet unpublished data from a late 2008 expert panel on the political positions of Czech parliamentary political parties. On the basis of this data the article seeks to answer the following research questions: What is the character of the Czech policy space? What is the relationship between substantive policy dimensions and the synthetic right-left dimension? What additional potential does mapping the policy space offer in comparison with research based on other premises?

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