Multiparty Democracy: Elections and Legislative Politics (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)

This book adapts a formal model of elections and legislative politics to study party politics in Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. The approach uses the idea of valence, that is, the party leader's non-policy electoral popularity, and employs survey data to model these elections. The analysis explains why small parties in Israel and Italy keep to the electoral periphery. In the Netherlands, Britain, and the US, the electoral model is extended to include the behavior of activists. In the case of Britain, it is shown that there will be contests between activists for the two main parties over who controls policy. For the recent 2005 election, it is argued that the losses of the Labour party were due to Blair's falling valence. For the US, the model gives an account of the rotation of the locations of the two major parties over the last century.

Norman Schofield is Taussig Professor in Political Economy at Washington University in St Louis. He has served as Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Humboldt University Berlin in 2003–04, and held a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1988–89. Professor Schofield is the author of Architects of Political Change (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Mathematical Methods in Economics and Social Choice (2003), Multiparty Government (coauthored with Michael Laver, 1990), and Social Choice and Democracy (1985). He received the William Riker Prize in 2002 for contributions to political theory and is corecipient with Gary Miller of the Jack L. Walker Prize for the best article on political organizations and parties in the American Political Science Review for 2002–04.

Itai Sened is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St Louis. He has also served as Director of the Center for New Institutional Social Sciences there since 2000, and formerly taught at Tel Aviv University. Professor Sened is coauthor (with Gideon Doron) of Political Bargaining: Theory, Practice, and Process (2001), author of The Political Institution of Private Property (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and coauthor (with Jack Knight) of Explaining Social Institutions (1995). His research has been published in leading journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and the European Journal of Political Research.