Patterns of Party Competition

Abstract

This article presents several patterns of partisan competition suggested by an interplay of long-term and short-term forces in the political system. By applying constraints to the forces, one can note the effects on the temporal properties of party competition. Each pattern has an analogue in the political parties literature and a statistical procedure for its identification. Four patterns of party competition are considered: (1) a noncompetitive pattern, (2) a trend pattern, (3) a cyclic pattern, and (4) a Poisson pattern. Using time series data on the occurrence of partisan change events for the U.S. presidency and state governorships, the authors note several expectations of the patterns.