POLSCI 140 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Party System, Parliamentary System
2 Oct 2017
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Document Summary
Political parties can be thought of as a group of people that includes those who hold office and those who help get and keep them there: serve 4 main purposes, they structure the political world. In developing democracies, often to distribute selective benefits to clients. In developed democracies, often to distribute public goods and policies to constituents. Parties and social cleavages: one of the roles of parties is to represent particular groups in societies. Groups are formed around social cleavages: urban-rural cleavage, religious identity cleavage, etc. Voting paradoxes: the spoiler effect, cyclic preferences, failure of monotonicity. Explaining one-party dominance: formal institutions, unitary state, parliamentary system, sntv electoral rules, single non-transferrable vote, strong bureaucracy, weak judiciary, informal institutions, state-business mutual dependence, candidate-voter interactions, internal factions within the ldp, also, structural factors, ethnically homogenous. Incentivizes fewer parties: few social cleavages beyond rural/urban divide, most voters do not express strong partisan preferences. Now dominant enough again to revise the constitution.
