Prof. Stephen Nicholson and graduate student Chelsea Coe have just published "The Nature of Party Categories in Two-Party and Multiparty Systems" in Advances in Political Psychology. Congratulations to Prof. Nicholson, Chelsea, and co-authors!
The paper reviews a research program that studies how ordinary people make sense of politics by means of political party categories, which moves away from conventional spatial models of party politics. In particular, the paper addresses how parties as categories functions in two-party and multiparty systems. The authors analyze data from seven democracies, and show that people perceive parties to be highly differentiated regardless of their spatial position, a finding consistent with the categories perspective.
