A Proposal of Party Systems Typology for Democratic and Pluralist Authoritarian Regimes: Its Application to the Maghreb Countries

Abstract

Since the pioneering work by Sartori, few typologies have been created for party systems and the most recent ones have focused on one or two classification criteria, using democracies as their reference. This article proposes a typology of party systems that can be applied to both democratic and pluralist authoritarian regimes. It is based on four dimensions: competition, party system stability, number and balance between parties and polarization. To verify its validity, the typology was applied to three political regimes of Maghreb: Tunisia (defective democracy) Morocco (quasi-competitive authoritarianism) and Algeria (hegemonic authoritarianism). Its application corroborates the validity of the typology as a possible way of characterizing party systems and allowing transnational research.