The making of a competitive party system after the breakdown of a non-democratic regime, which by definition had suppressed party pluralism, entails not only the creation (and consolidation) of a greater or smaller number of party units with their specific ideological, programmatic and organisational identities, but also the shaping of ‘political space’ within which these units will interact. In fact, in a competitive system, even the identities of individual party units cannot be fully determined without locating them in the political space, i.e. in the systemic dimension. The notion of political space applies both to the mass and to the elite dimension of politics. 2 At the mass level it concerns the location of voters and parties with respect to the electoral competition. The (unimodal or poly-modal) distribution of voters, the number of dimensions (one or more) required to interpret political space, the (greater or smaller) degree of rigidity of voters and parties in moving their positions within this political space, are some of the crucial questions. At the elite level the specific features of political space are particularly relevant for the process of building coalitions between parties for the making of governments but also affecting parliamentary behaviour. It is not unwarranted therefore to say that the features of political space are at least as important as those of individual party units for understanding the working of the new political systems that have emerged after the failure of authoritarian regimes.