 Henry E. Hale, Why Not Parties? Electoral Markets, Party Substitutes, and Stalled Democratization in Russia Political party development in transitional polities can usefully be understood to emerge from imperfect competition in a market for electoral services in which candidates are consumers. The roots of weak party development are potentially to be found not only in institutional design and social cleavages, but also in the possible presence of strong party substitutes capable of successfully competing against parties in such markets. This model is shown to offer a solution to seemingly contradictory findings. It is backed by an original dataset on candidates and voting patterns in the understudied single member district half of Russia¡¯s parliamentary elections. |