Party systems, political institutions and policy: Policymaking in developing democracies

This dissertation is first and foremost about party systems. My focus on the party system stems from the desire to better understand the policymaking environment, particularly in developing country democracies. I begin by analyzing the party system as a dependent variable and pose the following questions: (1) what are the important elements of the party system as they relate to policymaking; (2) what factors affect these party system elements (what accounts for differences across party systems).; Through the cases of Thailand and the Philippines I investigate the factors that affect the number of political parties and the structure of the party system. I find that one can derive the nature of the party system from features of the social structure and institutional environment. I also argue that a complete approach to explaining the number of parties (and the breadth of their constituencies) should take into account both coordination within districts and coordination across districts---i.e. linkage. I offer a theory to explain when actors have an incentive to link across districts and when they do not.; I then turn my attention to the link between the party system and policymaking. I address two questions: (1) what are the effects of the party system on the provision of national policy? (2) how does the party system interact with political institutions to shape the capacity and incentives of political actors? I argue that the party system governs the number of actors (or veto players) in the policy process, as well as the incentives of those actors. In short, the party system gives us clues about: (a) who the relevant actors are, (b) the nature of their preferences, and (c) their ability to pursue those preferences. I find that unstructured party systems do indeed do a poorer job producing national policies compared to structured party systems.; Finally, I consider more carefully the institutional context within which party systems exist. I argue that among unstructured party systems, presidential systems may out-perform parliamentary systems in terms of their ability to provide national policies, given certain conditions. I find support for this argument in a large-n quantitative study as well as in case studies of privatization policy in Thailand and the Philippines.