A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis
Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors, J.F. Adams, S. Merill,
III and B. Grofman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.
311.A Unified Theory of Party Competition continues the
development of the important research agenda started by Merrill and
Grofman's A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Spatial
Proximity Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). This
agenda focuses on integrating hitherto diverging streams of the literature
in order to present sophisticated formal models that lead to empirically
testable predictions with more realistic results than earlier models. As
such, this book is at the cutting edge of developing the scientific study
of politics. Although written with an explicit theoretical concern in
mind, it presents a wealth of rigorous empirical tests, drawn from case
studies of Britain, France, Norway and the Unites States, to demonstrate
how well the theory travels across very different institutional and
contextual settings.
