ABSTRACT
To assess the effect of parliamentary party systems on World Bank governance scores in 2007, David Samuels and Matthew Shugart collected data on the distribution of party seats at two points: after a stimulus election prior to 2007 and after a referent election adjacent to the stimulus election. This chapter shows how the three largest parties in the stimulus election performed in a referent election, an election temporally adjacent to the stimulus election. The chapter considers how the twenty-three countries that lack political parties fared on the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGIs) in 2007. In countries with competitive elections, political parties operate most publicly during election campaigns. In some dramatic cases, parties holding a parliamentary majority after the stimulus election held no seats at all after the referent election. The cross-national literature offers numerous measures of party-system properties.
