Federalism, Parliamentary Government, and Single-Party Dominance: An Examination of Dominant Party Regimes in Canada, Germany, Australia, and Austria.

Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]