Four decades ago, William H. Riker published Federalism: Origin, Operation, Maintenance (1964). Riker's motivation in writing this book came from a question that he had raised in his earlier book, Democracy in the United States (1953) about the origins of Federalism in the United States. His argument was that only an outside threat could provide the motivation to politicians to give up power by joining the Federal apparatus. His later book, The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), also attempted to answer the question why plurality rule in the U.S. electoral system seemed to be the reason for both minimal winning coalitions and the two-party system. A further book, Positive Political Theory (with Peter Ordeshook, 1973), attempted to develop the theory, available at that time, on two-party elections. The convergence result presented in that volume was later shown to depend on unrealistic assumptions about the dimension of the space of political decisions. Later, using the so-called “chaos theorems,” Riker returned to the historical questions that had earlier intrigued him and suggested that manipulability and contingency were features of democratic systems (Riker, 1982, 1986, 1996).

Riker's work provides the motivation for this book and for a companion volume (Schofield and Sened, 2006). The formal theory of elections and coalitions, together with empirical analyses of elections in Britain, the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, and Italy, makes up that coauthored volume. This present volume addresses many of the historical questions raised by Riker, using as a conceptual basis the formal electoral model presented in the companion book.