Research Interests

My research Interests focus on party competition, coalition formation and voting behavior.

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Working Papers

• Segmented Electorates and Bargaining Delay in the Government Formation Process
  

The existing literature on government bargaining duration states that uncertainty and bargaining complexity aect government bargaining duration. I claim that the literature on government bargaining delay overlooked the eect of some parties competing over the same voters. I oer a novel approach to studying party competition by focusing on the degree to which the electorates of any two parties are segmented. I argue that having segmented electorates, and thus competing for dierent groups of voters, aects the behavior of parties and duration of government bargaining. I propose a measure of the degree to which electorates of any two parties in a party system are overlapping, and use this measure to explain the variation in bargaining duration. I use data from both Western and Central-Eastern Europe and nd that the degree to which parties compete over the same demographic groups aects the duration of government bargaining.

• Strategic Manipulation of Issue Salience. The Case of Poland
  

It has been argued that parties strategically manipulate salience of issues. It is however unclear which issues should parties choose to emphasize in order to gain an electoral advantage. This paper proposes a new theoretical approach to party competition and shows that it is advantageous for parties to emphasize issues on which they are positioned far away from their competitors. This new theoretical approach is used to explain the puzzling results of the 2005 election in Poland. It shows the change in the salience of political cleavages, which resulted from strategic behavior of the Polish right parties, and presents the evidence that it is advantages for parties to increase salience of issues in order to affect the perceived distance between parties.

• Pre-election Coalitions and Party System Development in Central Europe: The Role of Election Rules
  (with G. Bingham Powell, Jr.)
  

In the countries of Central Europe, democratization took place before most parties were created.  The countries of the region have experienced varying degrees of instability of their party systems since democratization. We use an original data set to evaluate the causes and consequences of pre-election coalitions in party competition and party system development in the eleven countries in Central Europe. We analyze the role of electoral system incentives in encouraging or discouraging pre-election coalitions and also point to legacies of pre-democratic communist regimes. We assess the continuity of pre-election coalitions and observe varying patterns of splits and mergers within and between countries, explained in part by the election rules.

Work in Progress

• _Electoral Balancing and Accountability of National Leaders in Second Order Elections in Central Eastern Europe
• Segmented Electorates and Coalition Survival
  
• Voting Angry: An Explanatory Analysis of the Transformation of the German Party System (with Peter Haschke)
  
• Endogenous Institutional Change: Origins of Gender Quotas (with Peter Haschke)