This paper focuses on how political and institutional features enhance political efficacy and encourage participation through party mobilization. Specifically, it explores how party competition and other contextual factors, such as the electoral system create incentives for parties (or candidates) to mobilize voters. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) provides a useful source for testing these hypotheses. This paper makes use of survey data collected after elections in more than 30 countries spanning a variety of party systems in both established and new democracies. The results demonstrate that political efficacy and behaviour is enhanced when parties have a strong incentive to mobilize voters. This is most likely to occur in systems where parties compete in a narrow issue space. In contrast, citizens are less likely to come into contact with parties in polarized systems. This has consequences for both political attitudes and engagement. Paper
