Social and Behavioral Sciences | Open Access Articles

Bolivia's Party System After October 2003: Where Did All The Politicians Go?, Miguel Centellas

Miguel Centellas

Bolivia’s political system has recently undergone a dramatic transformation after nearly two decades dominated by three “systemic” parties (MNR, ADN, MIR). Despite resisting challenges from “outsiders” (whether populists, leftists, or indigenous movements) for nearly two decades, the party system was quickly swept away after the “gas war” of October 2003. In its place, the new political landscape appears polarized into two distinct camps: Evo Morales’s MAS and an opposition led by PODEMOS. This paper offers a preliminary exploratory look at Bolivia’s most recent political transformation, looking particularly at the migration patterns of Bolivian career politicians between the 2002 and 2005 …

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When To Run And When To Hide: Electoral Coordination And Exit, Indridi Indridason

Indridi H Indridason

Elections represent a coordination problem for voters and candidates for office. Electoral coordination is also the causal mechanism behind any explanation of the relationship between electoral systems and the number of parties. I present a dynamic model of electoral coordination with candidate exit. The model extends two important results from the literature to a dynamic setting. The extension of Duverger's Law and the median-voter theorem also offers a simultaneous prediction of the number of parties and their ideological positions. Coordination failure is shown to be possible in a mixed-strategy equilibrium.

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