Segnalazione bibliografica West European Politics, Volume 34, Number 3, May 2011 , pp. 568-586(19) Autori: Jean-Benoit Pilet; Damien Bol Abstract: Most of the literature asserts that political parties rationally define their preference for electoral reform with respect to their possible gains and the balance of power between and within parties. Other scholars moderate this rationality, underlining the role of the uncertainty inherent to any change in the electoral system. This article shows how risk and expected gains interact. Through an analysis of the preferences of 84 parties in 13 different electoral reform debates, it shows that risk impedes parties from supporting even advantageous change....

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.

Segnalazione bibliografica. American Journal of Political Science, Volume 55, Number 4, 1 October 2011 , pp. 923-936(14) Autore: Margit Tavits Abstract This study argues that organizationally stronger local party branches are more powerful within the party than organizationally weaker branches: they can better perform the tasks central to the party, which include communication with, and mobilization of, voters. I further argue that this subunit power should be manifested in the parliamentary behavior and status of MPs: those from districts where the local party organization is strong are more...

Segnalazione bibliografica Autore: Peter Selb European Journal of Political Research, December 2011 Abstract How quickly, to what extent and under what conditions do voters and elites adapt to new electoral institutions in order to not waste their votes and effort on hopeless competitors? A latent-curve model of strategic adaptation is developed and fitted to district-level election data from Spain. The extent of strategic adaptation is generally found to vary with the strength of the electoral system. However, grave ethnic tensions are demonstrated to seriously retard adaptation even under favourable institutional conditions. Full Text: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2011.02049.x/abstract