Three essays on party competition in parliamentary democracies.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Political Science, 2014.This dissertation consists of three essays focusing on party competition in parliamentary democracies. In the first chapter, I provide an introduction to the topics covered in this dissertation. In the second chapter, I propose that parties manipulate issue salience to highlight not only issues on which they are perceived to be particularly competent, but also issues on which they are positioned far away from their main competitors. I use my theoretical proposition to explain the results of the 2005 election in Poland. In the third chapter, I offer a new approach to party competition by pointing out that parties with non-overlapping electorates are not intense competitors even if they are ideologically close to each other. I argue that parties perceive political entities that are popular among similar types of voters as their close competitors. In this analysis, I propose a measure of the degree to which the electorates of any two parties are overlapping. I show that the degree to which the electorates of parties are overlapping affects party behavior in the coalition formation process. In the fourth chapter of my dissertation, I analyze the competition in regional elections in Central Europe, focusing on how parties that are in the national level of government perform in regional elections, and to what extent their performance depends on voters' perceptions of national government performance. I show that the performance of national government parties in regional elections differs between countries and I offer explanations for these differences. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I discuss the implications of my findings