Vliv volebních reforem na politické a stranické systémy Latinské Ameriky po roce 1990
The Impact of Electoral Reforms on Political and Party Systems in Latin America after 1990

Summary/Abstract: The mutual relationship between electoral systems and party systems belongs to the fundamental issues for political science for recent decades. The causality between electoral and party systems anticipated in Maurice Duverger’s “laws”, published in 1950’s, has been verified, revised or falsified by many scholars for many times up to the present. These fundamentally different and sometimes even contradicting results of the scholars testing the impact of electoral engineering on party systems (and vice versa) have put a question about direction of upcoming inquiries of this matter. Hence, the present study summarizes the results, contrast them with each other and critically reflect fundamental findings and explanations of the scholars focusing (not just) on the linkages between setting of electoral systems and formats of party systems (or number of effective political parties respectively). In doing so, we focus on Latin America’s context which is very interesting and useful example from many reasons described bellow. On the basis of critical reflection, the study tries to draw possibly necessary changes in an approach to this issue, especially in terms of (in)dependent variables’ change or reformulation, reversing direction of the causality, and so on. This study could therefore facilitate further and more accurate research of mutual relationship between electoral and party systems.

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