Herbert Kitschelt is George V. Allen Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (with Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John D. Stephens, 1999) and author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (with Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski and Gabor Toka, 1999), The Transformation of European Social Democracy (1994) and The Radical Right in Western Europe (1995) which won the Woodrow Wilson Award of the APSA in 1996.

Steven I. Wilkinson is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asia and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University. His book Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge University Press, 2004) was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation prize. He is currently researching the links between colonial inheritances and post-independence levels of democracy, governance and conflict.

Post-Communist Party Systems examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the mid-1990s, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Legacies of pre-communist rule turn out to play as much a role in accounting for differences as the institutional differences incorporated in the new democratic rules of the game. The book demonstrates various developments within the four countries with regard to different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in legislative or executive alliances. The authors also present interesting avenues of comparison for broader sets of countries.