Party systems

2 hours reading, 2 hours writing, page count = 200

I've been reading up on party systems to flesh out the theoretical part of Chapter 1. While parties are an integral part of the story, including them explicitly in the theoretical framework is a new development from my last visit to Berkeley, so I have some catching up to do. Luckily, there's a lot written on this topic, including a very interesting journal that's had good, cutting-edge articles in the past year that have been very helpful.

Colombia really does stand out among Western democracies in terms of its long-lasting, stable two-party system. The U.S., Uruguay, Costa Rica, Paraguay: these are some of the only other places that have had basically the same two parties for so long. It's a key part of why Colombia ends up on its own path in the 20th century in my framework, so I'm glad to flesh out this piece, which will make my work interesting to a broader audience of scholars who study party systems. In this, I'm very lucky that one of my committee members is a party-system scholar himself. So it works out well.