Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties Theory: A classic question in political science concems ",hat deteImines the number of parties that compete in a given polity. Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to answering this question, one that emphasizes the role of electorallaws in structuring coalitional incentives, another that emphasizes the importance of pre-existing social cleavages. In tbis paper, we view the number of parties as a product of the interaction between these two forces, following Powell (1982) and Ordeshook and Shvetsova (1994). Hypotheses: The effective number of parties in a polity should be a multiplicative rather than an additive function ofthe peImissiveness ofthe electoral system and the heterogeneity ofthe society. Methods: Multiple regression on cross-sectional aggregate electoral statistics. Unlike previous studies, we (1) do not confine attention to developed democracies; (2) explicitly control for the influence of presidential elections, taking account of whether they are concurrent or nonconcurrent, and ofthe effective number ofpresidential candidates; and (3) also control for the presence and operation of upper tiers in legislative elections. Results: The hypothesis is confiImed, both as regards the number of legislative and the number of presidential parties .

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Europe has over the past century experienced an impressive increase in the number of presidential heads of state. Many of the new democracies since the mid-1970s are semi-presidential regimes that combine a popularly elected president with the traditional features of parliamentary democracy. At the same time, the frequency of the appointment of non-partisan cabinet members has risen. Cabinet appointments are the most important personnel decisions in parliamentary systems, and traditionally such appointments have been virtually monopolized by the governing political parties. Under semi-presidentialism, however, cabinet appointments may instead become a tug-of-war between a prime minister and a president with different partisan preferences. In this article the relationship between presidential power and the incidence of non-partisan cabinet appointments is examined and a game-theoretic model of cabinet appointments in parliamentary systems with a strong president is developed. In this model the prime minister has proposal power over cabinet appointments and the president an ex post veto. This model yields three comparative statics predictions concerning non-partisan cabinet appointments. The incidence of such appointments should covary positively with the president's powers and negatively with the prime minister's electoral prospects. The likelihood of such appointments should also correlate in a non-intuitive way with the value that the president and the prime minister attach to non-partisan appointees. Based on these results, eight operational hypotheses are developed, which are tested against a sample of 134 European cabinets representing twelve semi-presidential and twelve purely parliamentary regimes in the 1990s. Significant empirical support is found for all three comparative statics results and for most of the specific hypotheses.

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This article proposes a decision-theoretic model to explain how cabinets help presidents implement their policy-making strategies. Presidents are assumed to have two policy-making strategies: a strategy based on the use of statutes or a strategy based on executive prerogatives. If the president's preferences and the institutional incentives and economic conditions faced favor a statutory strategy, the president is more likely to appoint a majority cabinet, select more partisan ministers, and distribute portfolios to parties on a proportional basis. Econometric analysis of 106 cabinets appointed in 13 countries of the Americas demonstrates that the determinants of cabinet legislative status are the size of the president's party, extremist presidents, and economic crises. The share of partisan ministers and proportionality in portfolio allocation are affected by the size of the president's party, extremist presidents holding decree powers, the extension of the president's veto powers, and the elapsing of the president's term.