Party system closure and openness: conceptualization, operationalization and validation

The degree of closure of the governmental arena is a central aspect of the stabilization of party systems, and yet little systematic effort has been devoted to its operationalization. The article proposes a new index, examines its reliability and validity, and reports the ranking of 60 party systems. By redefining the units of measurement we suggest new indicators that are uniform and transparent in their logic of construction, can be applied both to specific government-changes and to time periods, and are sensitive to the degree of change. The article finds a hierarchy among the components of party system closure, dominated by coalition formula. While new and established democracies can both produced closed patterns, the analysis of inter-war European party systems shows that closed systems are less prone to authoritarian takeover. The article demonstrates the power of inertia: the completely closed configurations stand out as the most durable ones

The Rise and Sustainability of Party Leaders in Slovakia : Robert Fico and Mikuláš Dzurinda

Given the fact that only two relevant parties in Slovakia since 1993 have managed to replace their leaders and maintain their relevance, the role of personality traits in the rise and success of party leaders in Slovakia is an especially important topic. Therefore this chapter focuses on two party leaders – Robert Fico and Mikuláš Dzurinda – who are closely tied to more than two decades of political development in Slovakia during 1998-2019. They both managed to utilize their high level of personal popularity to reach the party leadership and via electoral success achieve intra-party cohesion and increase the membership in their parties. However, while Fico relied on his public popularity for another decade after becoming Prime Minister for the first time, Dzurinda gave up on building the popular public image and focused on managing his heterogeneous coalitions. Fico’s SMER thus remained an internally homogeneous party (to an outside observer) for as long as Fico was the most popular politician in Slovakia, while Dzurinda’s SDKÚ was completely marginalized because Dzurinda was not willing to step down as chairman, despite his decreasing public support and increasing criticism from inside the party.Peer reviewe

Unilateral regulation breaks regularity of Turing patterns

We consider a reaction-diffusion system undergoing Turing instability and augment it by an additional unilateral nonsmooth unilateral source term. We investigate its influence on the Turing instability and on the character of resulting patterns. We illustrate the importance of the nonsmoothness by a numerical case study, which shows that the Turing instability can considerably change if we replace this term by its arbitrarily precise smooth approximation. However, the nonsmooth unilateral term and all its approximations yield qualitatively similar patterns. Further, we show that the unilateral source breaks the approximate symmetry and regularity of the classical patterns and yields asymmetric and irregular patterns. Moreover, a given systém with a unilateral source produces spatial patterns even for diffusion parameters with ratios closer to 1 than the same systém without any unilateral term