Download or read book Changing Societies, Changing Party Systems written by Heather Stoll and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies how society shapes democratic political competition, with a focus on the number of political parties. This stands in contrast to the prevailing approach of explaining cross-national and longitudinal differences in political competition with political institutions such as the electoral system. The book develops the most general theory about how society shapes the number of parties to date, as well as the most extensive measures of social heterogeneity, which it uses to test its hypotheses.