Electoral Laws and Party Systems

This book is the second final output of the grant project “Electoral Reforms and Party Systems: the Czech Republic in international comparative context”. The first final output, a much more detailed account, has been published in Czech (Novák, M., T. Lebeda et al., Volební a stranické systémy. ČR v mezinárodním srovnání, Aleš Čeněk, Dobrá Voda 2004, ISBN: 80-86473-88-0, 485 p.). For the English collection we have chosen only those chapters that relate directly to the Czech case, and have started with the type of government. At the turn of the 20th/21st century, problems with the formation of governments led to attempts at reform of the electoral law of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament. One of the chapters of this book looks at the fate of an attempt at electoral reform. We believe that the Czech example is interesting and relevant for specialists abroad as well as at home. We are honoured that in this English collection we can publish an article written specially for our grant project by Prof. Rein Taagepera.