Bridging the Divide: Measuring Party System Change and Classifying Party Systems

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. performed using an original dataset of party system changes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

Foreign Aid, Instability and Governance in Africa

“…In this light, the study adopts the governance indicators from Kaufmann et al, consistent with a recent stream of literature on unbundling (Gani, 2011;Andrés & Asongu, 2013;Andrés et al, 2015;Oluwatobi et al, 2015;Yerrabit & Hawkes, 2015;Pelizzo & Nwokora, 2016 and bundling (Asongu, 2016;Nwachukwu, 2016a, 2016b) governance dynamics.…”

Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa

“…In the course of our empirical analyses, we plan to show that political parties do affect the quality of democracy, but also that this impact may be beneficial or detrimental depending on the extent to which the pattern of interparty competition is stable. Specifically, we do so by investigating whether the fluidity of party systems (Nwokora and Pelizzo ; Pelizzo and Nwokora ), or the extent of their instability, erodes several of the qualities associated with a high‐quality democracy. This question is of importance not only to scholars, but also practitioners working in the field of democracy promotion and consolidation.…”

“…While it has long been recognized that the static attributes of party systems—such as their extent of fragmentation and polarization—influence democratic governance, it is only relatively recently that researchers have become aware of the impact of party systems’ dynamic properties—or, in other words, the effects of party system change (see especially Mainwaring and Scully ). Utilizing the index of party system fluidity (Nwokora and Pelizzo ; Pelizzo and Nwokora ), which taps the extent to which the functional properties of a party system transform over time, we examine the relationship between party system change and the quality of democracy, as measured using various indicators. We do so with a concentration on the East African region, which contains significant, but perhaps underappreciated, diversity in terms of both party system dynamics and democratic governance.…”

Good Governance and Party System Change

“…For instance, Nwokora and Pelizzo (2015, 2018) suggested that the (in)stability and the institutionalization of a party system could be measured on the basis of what they defined as the index of fluidity. Building on Sartori's (2005) seminal work, Pelizzo and Nwokora (2016) noted that Sartori detected several patterns of interparty competition and that such patterns of interparty competition could be regarded as structured party systems only if they displayed some stability over time or if they lacked fluidity. While for Sartori fluidity was a dichotomous variable and reflected a difference in kind, Nwokora and Pelizzo (2018) suggested that, as all party systems display some levels of instability, it could be operationalized as a continuous variable to track changes in degree.…”