Four ways of considering partisanship and factionalism dominated the political landscape of the nineteenth-century United States: the residual anti-party views of classical republicans, who were often drawn to a traditional politics of deference involving voluntary allegiance to leaders of a higher class who would advance the “common good”; James Madison’s view that multiple factions, in shifting configurations extending across a large geographic expanse, could prevent majorities from dominating minorities; the stance of those like Andrew Jackson who believed that parties harnessed the power of the people, whose interests would otherwise suffer neglect or worse from elite leaders; and finally, the fear of a polarizing, two-party system expressed by John Adams evolved in the views of a Mugwump like Henry Adams, who held himself apart from partisan corruption without aspiring to restore the elite politics of deference. This chapter explores the presence of these varied approaches to partisanship and factionalism in literary works by Henry Adams, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgée, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Simon Pokagon.

This chapter uses data from the Dataset of Parties, Elections, and Ideology in Latin America (DPEILA) to understand the recent rightward move being seen in many party systems within the region, as well as the subsequent process of party-system polarization. The authors argue that major economic downturns favor radical, antisystem alternatives, thereby creating an opportunity for newly created parties to campaign on extreme policy platforms. They also demonstrate that polarization increases when leftist incumbents are associated with progressive policy change, as right-wing parties have become more ideologically extreme. This indicates that the left turn of the 2000s has at times favored the radicalization of important sectors of the right.

Political parties play an important role in mobilizing public opinion and articulating ideas that make their way into policy. In a competitive political environment, parties use their identity to carve out a distinct position in the public policy space. In the established democracies in Western countries, this space is defined in left–right terms and is shaped by underlying socio-economic factors. The relative constancy and stability of the party system has long characterized mainstream Comparative Politics research on the subject. This connection between ideology, party organization, and the emergence of a durable party system is less applicable to the African situation because countries there lack the social base that holds the party system in check. This chapter examines how political parties in African countries, like in other developing and democratizing regions, suffer from a low level of party institutionalization because political parties tend to be either just personalized factions or dominated by a single organization with little interest in opening space for other parties. Elections may occasionally produce changes in who holds power, but they rarely reflect real differences in policy. Instead, the consequence of political change is no more than a rearrangement of communities of consumption competing for access to power and government resources. Political parties do not need ideology to attract followers. Party strategies in Africa therefore are built around finding individuals with the qualities to serve as champions of as many consumption communities as possible. Where state capture, as in Africa, is the prime objective, party politics easily becomes both transactional and authoritarian. This form of politics that has been a dominant feature of African countries since independence sets limits on a democratic transition. Above all, it slows down the emergence of a political culture infused with democratic values.

Most critics of direct election of the president assume that it would require a runoff provision. Although it is possible that such a rule would encourage third-party candidacies, there is no need to institute a runoff under direct election of the president. Advocates of the electoral college are correct that America is better off without a second-ballot runoff election. They are incorrect, however, that the electoral college is the only way to avoid such a runoff. Although there is no voting system that guarantees that the most preferred candidate will win, both plurality election and ranked choice voting are more likely to produce the Condorcet winner than the electoral college. Neither system requires a second ballot. The electoral college is not essential for a two-party system and actually encourages third parties to run presidential candidates and discourages party competition in many states. There is no evidence that direct election of the president would polarize political parties. Similarly, there would be little incentive for secret deals under direct election and severe constraints on the bargains third parties could make. Moreover, there is much less chance of such deals under direct election than under the contingent election provision of the electoral college.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Liberal Party of Australia (LPA) (who, at the federal level, are in a formal Coalition with the National Party) dominate Australian politics. In its modern guise this dominance extends back to the 1940s, though with Labor/non-Labor party electoral competition extending right back to Federation (albeit in a more complex form until 1909). Despite recent evidence of falling support for the two main parties, they will almost certainly remain dominant for the foreseeable future and are the only serious contenders to lead any government at federal or state/territory level. It is important to understand where these parties came from, how they have changed, and the contemporary political and organisational challenges they confront.

The first section of this chapter examines the history and evolution of the major parties. In doing so, we explore their organisation and ideology and then consider how, if at all, the relationship between the major parties and voters has changed. The chapter concludes by examining the ways Australia’s major parties have been classified, and how they might differ from those in other advanced democracies.

The practice-based approach to theory development in the book is described.Three core values of electoral accountability - identifiability, evaluability, and the probability of sanction - are discussed.Theories of retrospective voting and conditional representation are also presented.

Slovenia has long been cited as a success story among the post-socialist countries due to the successful political management of multiple transitions, including the creation of an independent state and joining the European Union (EU) in 2004. However, the national political elite not only failed to formulate further developmental goals for Slovenia, but also proved incapable of effectively managing Slovenia’s socio-economic development in the context of full integration into the EU, which brought about a high availability of external finances. This, and particularly extensive borrowing of external money in mismanagement of the impacts of the international financial and economic crisis turned Slovenia into a country dependent on external loans and thereby also subordinated to policies dictated by external actors. Although Slovenia has been recovering from the economic crisis, the political crisis in the form of a series of early elections and complete de-institutionalization of a party system continues.

Despite its emergence from one of the more repressive communist states, and the prompt dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992, the new Czech Republic successfully democratized, marketized, and integrated into the complex of European institutions. In 2017, the Czech year-end growth rate of 5.5 percent led the OECD countries in Eastern Europe, and the Bertelsman Transformation index of 2018 ranked the Czech Republic as the leading consolidated democracy and market economy of the 129 countries ranked. This performance, however, masks some significant unresolved problems. This chapter explores the evolution of the Czech post-communist regime in three stages. The first part unpacks some important historical legacies of the multiple regimes the Czech Republic experienced in the twentieth century – parliamentary democracy in the interwar First Republic, the Nazi protectorate in World War Two, and the communist state. Attention then turns to the institutional framework for democratic decision-making. The final step is to analyze the broad political process under this system, emphasizing some of the distinctive dynamics that have created accountability problems in Czech politics and left some key problems still to resolve, not least the Czech version of Europe’s populist nationalist problem.

The chapter traces political developments in Slovakia from its sudden and controversial emergence as an independent state, following the breakup of Czechoslovakia, to the present day. Slovakia’s slow and difficult transition to democracy in the 1990s has been marked by nationalism and ambivalent attitude to liberal democracy and relations with the West. This was followed by a period of successful “Europeanization” and accession to the European Union and a relatively quick and successful joining of the Eurozone. It is argued that, despite the near-permanent political turbulence and the fluctuating party system, Slovakia’s democracy is progressing well, if not without problems. In highlighting problematic issues, it is suggested that they derive mostly from the absence of statehood tradition, the speed of reforms, and the legacy of communism. The misinterpretation of independence as the “ownership” of the state increases nationalist leanings within society, which then tolerates hostility to other ethnicities and immigrants. This negative legacy, when combined with post-communist distortion of history, the economic and social insecurity associated with speedy transition, and the absence of political responsibility, perpetuates corruption. The conclusion, whilst detailing these processes, argues that the democratization process in Slovakia has been perhaps more successful than expected, even if by no means complete.