Mughan, A. (2013). Kees Aarts, Andre Blais and Hermann Schmitt, Political leaders and democratic elections, reviewed by Anthony Mughan. Party Politics, 19(4), 683–684. http://doi.org/10.1177/1354068813485781 Vai al sito web

D’Alimonte, R., Di Virgilio, A., & Maggini, N. (2013). I risultati elettorali: bipolarismo addio? In ITANES (Ed.), Voto amaro. Disincanto e crisi economica nelle elezioni del 2013 (pp. 17–32). Bologna: Il Mulino. Retrieved from https://www.muli...

In cross-national research on party systems, the empirical units of analysis are often assumed to be self-evident, which can be conducive to misleading research results. This problem is particularly important with regard to party system classification, for which a methodologically rigorous approach to the units of analysis is needed. This article proposes a set of operational criteria for identifying elements that qualify for inclusion within the universe of democratic party systems among individual election outcomes and country-specific sequences of elections. On this basis, I introduce additional criteria for distinguishing between party systems and party non-systems, and among party systems evolving within the same nation-state settings. By applying these criteria to a set of 1502 national legislative elections held in the world’s democracies from 1792 to 2009, the article identifies 162 units that can be entered into a classification of the world’s democratic party systems and 21 party non-systems.

D’ALIMONTE, R. D. R. (2013). I risultati elettorali: bipolarismo addio ? In ITANES (Ed.), Voto amaro. Disincanto e crisi economica nelle elezioni del 2013 (pp. 17–32). Bologna: Il  Mulino.

How do global sources of information such as mass media outlets, state propaganda, NGOs, and national party leadership affect aggregate behavior? Prior work on this question has insufficiently considered the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. By explicitly modeling this interaction, I show that social network structure conditions media's impact. Empirical studies of media effects that fail to consider this risk bias. Further, social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior made more severe when individuals can select into media matching their preferences. Countervailing media outlets and social elites with unified preferences can mitigate the effect of bias; however, media outlets promulgating antistatus quo bias have an advantage. Theoretical results such as these generate numerous testable hypotheses; I provide guidelines for deriving and testing hypotheses from the model and discuss several such hypotheses.