What explains which groups are included in a party coalition in any given election cycle? Recent advances in political party theory suggest that policy demanders comprise parties, and that the composition of a party coalition varies from election to election. We theorize three conditions under which parties articulate an interest group’s preferred positions in its quadrennial platform: when groups are ideologically proximate to the party median, when groups display party loyalty, and when groups are flush with resources. Using computer-assisted content analysis on a unique and rich data source, we examine three cycles of testimony that 80 organized groups provided to the Democratic Party. The analysis compares group requests with the content of Democratic and Republican National Committee platforms in 1996, 2000, and 2004. Results show that parties reward loyal groups and those that are ideologically proximate to the party but offer no confirmation of a resource effect.
How do electoral rules affect the occurrence of legislative party switching? Existing research addressing this question is limited and does not reach a consistent conclusion. This article argues that electoral systems that encourage politicians to cultivate a personal vote dampen parties’ ability to retain members. The greater incentives to cultivate a personal vote in candidate-centred electoral systems result in politicians relying more on local supporters and less on party label for their re-election. In such systems, compared to party-centred systems, I expect that only parties that suffer electoral setbacks to be more likely to witness switching, as their candidates are less concerned with party labels, and local supporters might follow them to the new party, thus reducing switching costs. Drawing on data from 17 European democracies over the period 1990–2013, I find support for my hypothesis. While there is no direct effect of electoral rules on switching, the results suggest that this effect hinges upon parties’ ability to deliver seats: losing parties are more likely to witness switching in candidate-centred systems than in party-centred systems. Further findings also demonstrate how this effect is especially significant when district magnitude is large and the next election is approaching.
Multiculturalism is an increasingly salient election issue. The growing size of many countries’ ethnic minority populations pushes parties to support multiculturalism, whereas the emergence of far-right parties in many countries pressures them to oppose it. This article examines parties’ positions on multiculturalism in a comparative context. It looks at 19 countries including most of Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. It argues that the influence of ethnic minorities over parties depends on electoral systems, and the strategies mainstream parties adopt in response to the far-right. The article finds that increases in ethnic minorities’ electoral strength lead parties to increase their support of multiculturalism to a greater degree in single-member district electoral systems than in proportional ones. Further, parties co-opt the anti-multicultural positions of far-right parties, and right parties do so more than left parties.
In exploring the first two decades of evolution of political programmes applied for the electoral processes in Slovenia, a young European multiparty parliamentary democracy with a proportional electoral system and multiparty government coalitions, the article contributes to a rich tradition of studying the programmes of political parties as relevant narrators of the development of democratic systems and suggests an answer to ‘why do parties write manifestos?’ The main findings include the distinct issue emphasis of parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties’ manifestos and convergence in issue emphasis over time among parliamentary parties who go on to form coalition governments. Regarding the ‘why’, these and other findings indicate that the manifestos considered here are intended more for post-election purposes – in particular, for the formation of alliances and negotiating and running a coalition government – than for attracting voters in the pre-election period. Party programmes are seen more as self-intended tools for political struggle than as promoters or control mechanisms for the further development of the democratic political system.
The organizational history of the British Labour Party is to a significant degree the story of an ongoing struggle over the ‘how’ of election manifestos, a struggle, partly driven by a broad-based agreement over the ‘why’ of manifestos. This is a struggle between a ‘parliamentary independence’ wing and a ‘grass-roots control’ wing. Because the manifesto is seen as a programme for government action, this also means that the answer to the how takes on huge importance, because controlling the how means controlling government action. This article will show the nature and extent of the disagreement between the two wings and argue that it has repeatedly damaged the Labour Party’s ability to operate effectively. In this struggle, the two opposing sides have at various times scored temporary ‘victories’. However, whichever argument ‘won’ at any given time, the long-term result was damage to the party’s ability to function properly. The article will also argue that after multiple generations of struggle, this issue is essentially still unresolved.
This research note analyses the role that party manifestos play in El Salvador and Guatemala, two newer democracies. In recent elections, the importance of manifestos has increased in both systems. This study examines this development. It explores the ‘why’s’ (purpose) and ‘how’s’ (the method of production) of party manifestos to learn more about the internal workings of parties and their relationship with society. The findings from this study suggest that in new democracies, international party assistance programmes can play a crucial role in making manifestos relevant. Whether manifestos enhance democracy in the long term, however, depends on party system institutionalization. These results point to an opportunity for research in new and younger party systems.
For more than two decades, scholars have been debating the so-called personalization of politics. Some studies confirm such an evolution, while others demonstrate that evidence of personalization is at best mixed, or even absent. This article aims at shedding a new light on this controversy by looking at the evolution of the use of preferential voting in Belgium. Preferential voting has been constantly growing, but since 2007, the trend has been reversed and fewer voters decide to cast a preferential vote. We argue that this decline is not evidence against personalization. Rather, it illustrates the need to distinguish conceptually and empirically between two dimensions of personalization: ‘centralized’ and ‘decentralized’ personalization. The decline in the use of preference votes is not related to a decline in the former (which refers to a handful of political leaders). Instead, it is due to the decline of the latter form of personalization (referring to a large group of individual politicians). Candidates other than party leaders appear to have growing difficulties to attract votes. This negative relationship holds, even when we control for measures of electoral reform and the newness of parties. Our results also show that leadership effects are stronger in new parties.
It is the purpose of this article to highlight some of the variants that can serve as important avenues for future exploration into the "how’s" (production methods) and "why’s" (purposes) of party manifestos (aka platforms). Beyond discussing conceptual and theoretical issues pertaining directly to the how’s and why’s, the piece also includes a section on alternative dimensions of the "what" of manifesto content (i.e. alternatives to the much more studied "salience" and "position" dimensions). While it draws heavily from literature on established, western democracies, attention is also paid to special needs for extending manifesto research to include newer, less institutionalized democracies.
Despite the large body of literature on the emergence and success of new political parties in Western Europe, few, if any, attention has been paid to investigate new parties from a systemic perspective, therefore exploring their potential effects on party systems. This article focuses on party system innovation (PSInn), defined as the aggregate level of ‘newness’ recorded in a party system at a given election. After having reviewed the extant literature on the topic, the article discusses what a new party is and provides a new index to measure PSInn. The article analyses the evolution of PSInn across 324 elections held in 19 West European countries from 1945 to 2015 and its cumulative effects over time. Although in most countries the party landscape today is still very similar to the one appearing after World War II, data offer clear evidence of a sharp increase of innovation in the last few years.
In this article, I argue that Westminster parliamentary systems encourage large opposition parties to replace their leaders between elections. Parliamentary system structures how parties compete over legislative outcomes. In Westminster systems, the government’s dominance in the legislative process promotes an adversarial government–opposition relationship. Subsequently, large opposition parties’ electoral prospects are tied to their ability to discredit the government’s policy agenda. Since this responsibility falls to party leaders, leaders of large opposition parties directly affect their parties’ electoral prospects, and parties are more motivated to replace those who are ineffective in damaging the government’s credibility. Therefore, leaders of large opposition parties in Westminster systems carry a higher risk of replacement than their counterparts in other parliamentary systems. I construct an original data set on party leadership turnover in 14 established parliamentary democracies. Results from Cox proportional hazard models support my claim and suggest that institution influences intraparty dynamics.
This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on competitors, references to a party’s track record, subjective and objective policy pledges and the prominence of party leaders in manifestos. We also show that these elements are present in manifestos of major European parties. The relevance of these categories, we argue, should be influenced by a party’s status in government or opposition, its ideology, its size, the relative popularity of party leaders and the occurrence of early elections. Our systematic examination of 46 Austrian election manifestos produced between 1986 and 2013 demonstrates that many of these expectations are supported by the evidence. Most notably, it emerges that government and opposition parties write manifestos that differ with respect to all of the five characteristics analysed. This suggests that there are systematic differences between government and opposition party manifestos that should be taken into consideration by scholars engaged in manifesto-based research.
The assignment of seats to specialized standing committees is a most consequential choice in legislative contexts. Distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes result in the self-selection of legislators to committees best suited to please their constituents and, thus, to secure reelection. However, these theories discard the partisan basis of European parliaments and therefore fail to adequately assess the politics of committee assignments in these particular contexts. This article aims to explore the significance of distributive theories for the German case in differentiated ways and on the basis of a new and rich data set including statistical data for five legislative terms (1983, 1987, 1998, 2005, and 2009). It argues that in partisan assemblies, political parties might develop an interest in distributive politics themselves and might assign distinct types of legislators to distinct committees to seek personal votes contingent upon distinct electoral incentives. Particularly, we argue that Germany’s mixed proportional system provides incentives to parties to assign legislators with profound local roots to district committees best suited to please geographic constituents.
Habitual party donors represent an important revenue source for American political parties. What remains unclear is whether the party committees can also count on these donors to support the congressional candidates who represent the parties’ best chances for seat maximization. Utilizing structural equation modeling and contribution data from the 2006 to the 2012 election cycles, I find habitual party donors and certain new party donors respond to changes in party control of the House by providing more support to incumbents when their party is in the majority and more support to nonincumbents when their party is in the minority. Moreover, party donors are more likely to give to congressional candidates, especially those competing in priority races, than nonparty donors. Party donors additionally are revealed to be an important funding source for congressional candidates.
The three main statewide British parties – Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats – all produce different versions of their manifestos in British general elections. Many policies debated in a British general election no longer apply at the subnational level, where separate devolved institutions control large areas of policy. This article therefore assesses the roles of national party manifestos at the subnational level in British general elections. It develops an original theory linking Strom’s alternative party goals to Ray’s typology of mandate/contract manifestos, advertisement manifestos and identity manifestos. It then explores a comparative overview of British parties’ general election manifestos at the subnational level, before focusing in detail on Labour’s 2010 and 2015 general election manifestos, which reflect the party’s strategic difficulties caused by devolution. The expected variation is found between the national and subnational manifestos. In some instances, multiple goals are pursued simultaneously and this is reflected in manifestos which assume elements of more than one manifesto ideal type. This supports the additional conclusion that manifestos can perform multiple functions in complex multilevel systems of government.
Ideology is one of the most relevant variables in explaining the level of women’s representation attained by political parties. While left-wing parties are typically the best performers, extant research has tended to overlook the diversity of the left block and predominantly focused on mainstream left-wing political parties, namely the Social Democrats. Yet, the Left also includes both Green parties and radical left parties. This article analyzes the differences that exist within this largely heterogeneous group of parties across Western Europe. In particular, it explores how the diverse ideological background of radical left and Green parties leads to varied ways of engaging with feminism, diverse forms of organizing women within their ranks as well as dissimilar positions toward gender quotas. These shape different levels of women’s numerical representation in public office and in party decision-making positions. Generally, we find that ideology is a greater determinant of representation than geographical region. Our findings also show a significant convergence among distinct party subgroups in terms of their share of elected women in both party and public office.
There is growing evidence that voter and party positions on economic items do not conform to a left–right dimension. This article proposes that in Northern Eurozone states voter policy positions on economic issues are characterized by two dimensions: A redistribution dimension that consists out of views on income equality and a reform dimension that divides those who favour reform of the welfare state to ensure its long-term sustainability and those who oppose such reforms because they would hurt those who need the welfare state now. It examines to what extent voters positions on economic issues conform this two-dimensional pattern, employing the 2012 Dutch Election Survey; to what extent positions on these dimensions reflects voters’ attitudes on other issues and demographic characteristics; and to what extent these two dimensions help to understand voting behaviour. It shows that indeed a multidimensional approach to economic issues is justified; that voters who oppose reforms are characterized by higher levels of Euroscepticism; and that this reform dimension helps to understand voting behaviour, in particular preferences for the socialist, social-democratic and social-liberal party.
This article explores the determinants of the allocation of parliamentary posts to specific legislators. Using an original data set of biographical information and committee assignments for almost 10,000 legislators in five non-presidential democracies (i.e. Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, and Spain), we provide evidence that distributive posts are more likely to be allocated to electorally vulnerable members of parliament, mainly under candidate-centered electoral rules. We also show that posts in high-policy committees are usually assigned to prominent legislators within the parties. Contrary to what one could expect based on the literature on candidates’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote, we find that the effect of district magnitude on the distribution of legislative posts does not depend on the type of list.
The literature on democratic transitions considers the participation of new parties in the first pluralist election in a post-authoritarian context (founding election) as something to be taken for granted. As such, it is never questioned. Specialists in democratic transitions ignore the research on "new parties," which is, nonetheless, essential to the understanding of the particular characteristics of a post-authoritarian situation. Using an original qualitative study on Algeria, this article proposes to bring to light the political, organizational, and legal conditions of new political parties’ participation or nonparticipation in a founding election. In particular, this research allows us to grasp the dilemmas and difficulties faced by leaders of new parties and the types of support on which they rely to engage for the first time in an electoral competition. The analytical framework stemming from this "case study" is applicable to other national case studies.
This article assesses the importance of religious affiliation, observance, faith and party choice in categorizing attitudes to two of the most important contemporary moral and ethical issues: same-sex marriage and abortion. While religious conditioning of moral attitudes has long been seen as important, this article goes beyond analyses grounded in religiosity to explore whether support for particular political parties – and the cues received from those parties on moral questions – may counter or reinforce messages from the churches. Drawing upon new data from the extensive survey of public opinion in the 2015 Northern Ireland election study, the article analyses the salience of religious, party choice and demographic variables in determining attitudes towards these two key social issues. Same-sex marriage and abortion (other than in very exceptional abortion cases) are both still banned in Northern Ireland, but the moral and religious conservatism underpinning prohibition has come under increasing challenge, especially in respect of same-sex marriage. The extent to which political messages compete with religious ones may influence attitudes to the moral issues of the moment.
This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.
Democracy is an abstract and murky concept. This is particularly apparent in the wide variety of beliefs about democracy held by publics around the globe. Within democracies, political parties often define and name themselves with reference to a particular understanding of democracy. This article focuses on this partisan division in understanding democracy. We suggest that parties will attract those who share similar beliefs about democracy. Specifically, we look at whether differences in beliefs about democracy predict party support in the United States. Examining the responses of US participants to the fifth wave of the World Values Survey, we find that differences on a number of "essential" aspects of democracy among individuals predict vote intent (and party identification). Those more likely to understand democracy as a form of government that promotes civil liberties and the redistribution of wealth to protect the vulnerable are more likely to vote Democrat. Those who report stronger associations between democracy and both religious interpretation of laws and severe punishment of criminals are more likely to vote Republican. This research reinforces the idea that policy differences between the two main parties in the United States may derive from different understandings of the role of government in society.
While it is widely accepted that in the United States, political party labels serve as brand names which cue voters about the beliefs and ideologies of members, I explore the possibility that the signals sent by these labels are contingent upon the party membership of the individual voter. More specifically, I draw on social identity theory and hypothesize that individuals will be more likely to perceive heterogeneity among members of their own party. I find support for this hypothesis in perceptions of both the overall ideologies and voting records of US senators. Additionally, I compare respondent perceptions back to actual voting records and find that inpartisans are (1) only more likely to be correct when senators do in fact vote differently and (2) significantly less likely to be correct when senators vote the same way. These results suggest that the partisan differences uncovered are due to psychological bias and not just informational asymmetries and that biases stemming from group membership may lead to distorted opinions of senators and the representation they provide.
I consider how asymmetric information between the party selectorate and members of Parliament affects the renomination of incumbent candidates. By applying an adverse selection model, I argue that the selectorate looks to past performance to select candidates it expects will gain influence. However, the impact of performance varies according to the need for and availability of information. The European Parliament (EP) provides a most-likely case for information asymmetry. Studying three elections in 11 member states, I find that the allocation of influential positions in office improves chances of reselection. The effect increases when the allocation is more selective, and when the prior uncertainty around candidacies is high. The study thus proposes a new approach to the relationship between national parties and transnational groups in the EP. It also suggests venues for research on parliamentary politics and candidate selection in general.
How does a history of participation in secular authoritarian regimes shape the trajectory of religious political parties after transitions to democracy? This article examines the contrasting experiences of Catholic political parties in Latin America in order to assess whether and under what conditions pre-transition participation has a positive effect on post-transition electoral performance. It develops a theoretical account that emphasizes the relative costs and benefits of participation in secular authoritarian politics for religious parties. Empirically, it uses an original data set covering 22 Catholic parties that participated in 104 elections across Latin America as well as in-depth case studies of Mexico and Peru. It finds that Catholic parties that participated in authoritarian politics were more likely to emerge as significant players after transition, but that this effect is contingent on the competitiveness of the authoritarian regime.
Party office is a crucial political resource for those seeking a political career. It provides advantageous access to the distribution of the patronage parties are entitled to in party government democracies. This article aims at measuring this comparative advantage while simultaneously investigating whether it benefits women and men equally in political recruitment processes. We concentrate on viable candidacy for parliamentary office, ministerial appointments, as well as post-ministerial offices in public and semi-public life that are also in the hands of political parties to distribute. Our cross-national analysis of advanced industrial democracies shows that men are much more likely than women to benefit from holding party office in their ascendant political careers, even when controlling for other political resources, sociodemographic factors and country-level variables. This suggests that party office is a gendered political resource and that gender power dynamics are deeply entrenched in political parties.
This article analyzes the patterns of informal political exchange between Ghanaian parliamentarians. Whereas research on Western parliaments identifies the party dimension as the strongest predictor for explaining exchange patterns, we develop three possible theoretical explanations for non-Western legislatures. We try to explain informal political exchange by shared ideology (party), solidarity (ethnicity), or same material interests (region). We test our claims by a novel data set based on a survey with almost all members of the current Ghanaian legislature. We analyze the exchange network using exponential random graph models. Our results suggest that regional origin, as compared to party attachment and ethnicity, is the superior predictor for informal political exchange between parliamentarians.
This article addresses the questions of whether and why political parties respond to media-covered street protests. To do so, it adopts an agenda-setting approach and traces issue attention in protest politics and parliament over several years in four West European countries (France, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The article innovates in two ways. First, it does not treat the parties in parliament as a unitary actor but focuses on the responses of single parties. Second, partisan characteristics are introduced that might condition the effect of protest on parliamentary activity. More precisely, it assesses the explanatory power of ideological factors (left-right orientation and radicalism) and other factors related to issue competition between parties (opposition status, issue ownership and contagion). The results show that parties do respond to street protests in the news, and they are more likely to respond if they are in opposition and if their competitors have reacted to the issue.
While analysis of the relationship between the descriptive and substantive representation of women has mainly focused on women politicians as critical actors in many contexts political parties provide the linkage between voters’ preferences and policy programmes. The manner in which political parties respond to women voters is shaped by both the information they receive about women voters’ preferences, from the news media, pollsters and other sources, and by gendered party type. Analysis of parties’ attempts to target women voters can help us understand whether parties perceive women as typical or average voters. I conduct two case studies on the influence of gendered newsframes on party policy and inter-party competition in the United States and Great Britain to formulate a preliminary analytic framework designed to facilitate research to assess how parties’ responses to portrayals of women voters vary according to institutional and contextual factors across time and space.
While parties in many new democracies frequently split, merge, change labels, and make and break electoral alliances, comparative systematic research on how these changes are related to each other is limited. This study addresses this gap by conceptualizing change as a result of intra-party conflicts, conflicts in or consolidation of existing electoral alliances, and the formation of new alliances and mergers. We develop measures for each type of change using an original dataset that covers almost 800 party-electoral term dyads in 11 countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the period between 1990 and 2015. Our findings contradict the idea of party change as a uni-dimensional phenomenon. Instead we find that exits from existing electoral alliances, their consolidation through mergers, and the formation of new alliances and mergers are moderately related to each other, but not with intra-party splits. Our findings suggest that parties and their alliances structure political competition in Central and Eastern Europe relatively well. Moreover, negative consequences of party change on representation and accountability are limited, as under the relative absence of multiple and nearly simultaneous changes in party identity the electorate should be able to follow party evolution.
Why do parties offer broad or narrow policy agendas to voters? Taking up the call to focus more on ‘issue diversity’ in election campaigns, this article argues that agenda scope is informed by (1) parties’ experience with government participation and (2) their internal organizational structure. Non-governing challengers, which are losers in the current system, seek to change the political status quo by focusing on a few issues only, whereas mainstream parties have an incentive to reinforce existing patterns of competition and thus distribute their attention across a wide range of issues. However, the extent to which parties respond to these external stimuli depends on intraparty politics. Party leaders seek to satisfy vote- and office-seeking motivations and want to ‘appeal broadly’, whereas activists want the party to ‘speak to the base’ and narrow down its issue appeals. Analyses of party agendas in 18 European democracies (1950–2013) support these expectations.
The recent finding that right-wing parties increasingly make efforts to integrate women’s concerns raises questions as to whether ideology still counts as a reliable indicator for women’s substantive representation and how different party contexts shape opportunities for the articulation of women’s interests. This article therefore critically reassesses how ideology defines the opportunities for women’s substantive representation, based on a comparative study of legislators’ acting on behalf of women in 14 European countries. We argue that ideology still offers an important explanation for women’s substantive representation, but that the link between the two should be conceptualized as complex rather than straightforward. The role of ideology is best understood if scholars (1) adopt an understanding of ‘ideology’ that allows for more variation and is conceptually different from ‘party’, (2) differentiate between gendered interests and feminist interests and (3) understand the impact of ideology as both direct and mediated.
Political party leaders are among the most influential actors in parliamentary democracies, and a change in party leadership is an important event for a party organization. Yet, we do not know how these leadership changes affect voter perceptions about party policy positions. On the one hand, we may expect party leadership changes to renew attention to the party, educate voters about its policy positions, and hence reduce disagreement among voters about party positions. On the other hand, rival parties may use a leadership change as an opportunity to defame the party, its leadership, and policies, and hence, increase voter confusion about the party’s policies. Using data from seven Western European democracies, I show that leadership changes help parties reduce voter disagreement about party policy positions. This effect is stronger if the new leader shifts the party’s policy positions.
The question of how party leaders are selected has recently, and belatedly, come under systematic comparative scrutiny. If it is the location of intra-party power that interests us, however, it might be that some of the more observable indicators in such processes, such as the identity of the selectorate, are not actually the most revealing ones. Using a delegation perspective, we thus present a framework for analysing prior steps in leader selection and relate it to various ideal-typical constellations of intra-party power. The framework encompasses, first, what we call precursory delegation, with focus especially on an agent that, formally or informally, manages the selection process before it reaches the selectorate. Second, the framework takes account of the degree to which the process is managed rather than left open to free competition between leader candidates. We illustrate the framework primarily with instances of leader selection in two Swedish parties.
Intraparty politics is a precursor to political parties’ policy proposals, manifestos, selected leaders and candidates, which often involves many actors and is regularly accompanied by tensions. This essay introduces the contents of a special issue devoted to the internal dynamics of political parties in Europe. We connect each contribution of the issue to three key aspects of intraparty research: (1) sources of information on internal party politics and methods of analysis, (2) how contemporary parties reconcile or otherwise address disagreements within the party and (3) the electoral and other ramifications of internal party tensions or divisions. Overall, the comparative case studies and cross-national comparisons across Western and Eastern Europe included in this issue show that considerations of intraparty dynamics advance scholarly research on alliances and coalitions, party organizations and party competition.
The political representation of women and ethnic minorities has received growing attention among political parties around the world. Focusing on the British case, we map data and debates concerning the selection of female and minority candidates, highlighting the simultaneous and interactive role of gender and race in shaping citizens’ opportunities to stand for and win election. Utilizing data from the Labour Party, our analysis illustrates the implications of distinct strategies to include members of politically marginalized groups—as well as provides evidence for the potential of "tandem quotas" to result in positive outcomes for minority women. Taken together, these findings suggest the need for stronger measures on the part of Labour to encourage the selection of minority candidates; a shift from "single-axis" to "multiple-axis" thinking when devising strategies to enhance group representation; and rejection of a "zero-sum" mentality regarding the nomination of female and minority candidates.
Party members across European democracies exercise increasing influence on parties’ policy platforms or personnel choices. This article investigates ideological (in)congruence on the left–right spectrum between members and their parties by drawing on a party membership survey of more than 10,000 individuals across seven political parties in Sweden. The results show that around two-thirds of members are not perfectly congruent with their party. In a two-step analysis, the article argues that emancipated members, with higher political interest and with a more independent self-conception, are more comfortable being ideologically incongruent with their party. We also provide evidence that ideological incongruence matters for members’ exit, voice and loyalty behaviour. It is associated with a more negative evaluation of the party leader (voice) and with a higher probability to either vote for another party (loyalty) or even to leave the current one (exit). The findings indicate that ideological incongruence within parties is not a trivial matter, but is rather substantial in size with potentially important consequences for party competition.
The majority party dominates legislative outputs and throughputs in rule-driven institutions, but these agenda-setting powers may not extend to other facets of the policy process. This article assesses the minority party’s ability to influence majority party issue attention in the US House of Representatives by analyzing one-minute speeches given on the House floor. This new measure of partisan issue attention highlights how the parties focus on the same policy issues in the same relative proportions, rather than crafting divergent issue agendas. Time series analysis indicates gaps between the parties’ level of attention to particular issues result in corresponding changes to majority party attention, which suggests the minority party can influence majority party issue attention by placing more emphasis on specific policy issues.
Party member women’s organizations were early features of party development. While some contemporary studies maintain these are important sites for the substantive representation of women, there is also a claim that they are in decline. Our primary purpose here is to establish the existence of party member women’s organizations – as one test of the first dimension of party feminization: the inclusion of women. We draw on new survey data of 17 European countries provided by Scarrow, Poguntke and Webb. We establish that almost half have a party member women’s organization. The new data also permits analysis of relationships between party member women’s organization and gender quotas for the top party leadership body (National Executive Committee (NEC)), women’s presence among the party leadership and candidate quota rules. Together we see these (i) as a means to establish whether women are marginalized within the party, thereby limiting descriptive representation and (ii) as surrogate measures for women’s substantive representation. We importantly find that the presence of a party member women’s organization does not come at the cost of women’s presence on the NEC. In the final section, we turn our attention to building a new comparative research agenda that more fully addresses substantive representation.
Parties coordinate on a range of activities. They invite leaders from other parties to their national meetings, run joint electoral platforms and even form parliamentary factions and coalition governments. The implications of regular cooperation such as the case of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) for party positioning are unexplored. Parties form PECs to reduce competition for voters with ideologically close competitors and to signal their ability to cohesively govern. Building on this logic, we argue that parties’ preferences converge in PECs to demonstrate their ability to govern together and diverge when parties observe that this tactic has failed to attract voter support in past elections. We demonstrate support for our approach using data on electoral coalition participation, party positions and parties’ internal speeches. Additional evidence from an extreme case of an enduring electoral coalition in Germany shows that PECs have dramatic effects on parties’ positions.
In a political context, the ‘glass ceiling’ is shorthand for the barriers faced by women politicians, resulting in them being less likely to reach executive roles at the same rate as their male colleagues. This article outlines a case where there was sex equality in executive appointments; a cohort study of British Labour Party MPs elected at the 1997 parliamentary election. Examining executive appointments at the cabinet and sub-cabinet level, descriptive analysis shows no statistically significant differences in the proportion of men and women reaching executive positions, or the prestige and gender type of these positions. Regression modelling confirms this, and sex is not found to be a significant driver of these patterns. Three factors are identified that combined to achieve this – critical actors, favourable context and a left-wing party in government. The article concludes with a call for further comparative research using the cohort study method.
Scholars have emphasized the need to deepen investigation of intraparty politics. Recent studies look at social media as a source of information on the ideological preferences of politicians and political actors. In this regard, the present article tests whether social media messages published by politicians are a suitable source of data. It applies quantitative text analysis to the public statements released by politicians on social media in order to measure intraparty heterogeneity and assess its effects. Three different applications to the Italian case are discussed. Indeed, the content of messages posted online is informative on the ideological preferences of politicians and proved to be useful to understand intraparty dynamics. Intraparty divergences measured through social media analysis explain: (a) a politician’s choice to endorse one or another party leader, (b) a politician’s likelihood to switch off from his or her parliamentary party group; and (c) a politician’s probability to be appointed as a minister.
In this article, we analyze transnational party politics in the European Union from a gender perspective. This is a subject that has been neglected both by mainstream European studies on party politics and by gender scholars who work on political parties. Drawing on the insights of these two research traditions, we build toward an analytical framework to study gender and transnational party politics. Our empirical analysis focuses on two policy issues, the economic crisis and the sexual and reproductive health and rights, analyzing European Parliament reports, debates and voting on the issues from 2009 to 2014. By focusing on gender equality constructions and the way in which consensus and contestation are built around them within and between party groups, we argue that shared constructions about gender equality are issue specific and change over time. Consensus breaks down along the left right axis and, at the same time, internal divisions within party groups affect policy output.
Contemporary scholarship on intra-party democracy pays a great deal of attention to aggregative procedures like primaries or membership ballots but widely ignores deliberative procedures within parties. This article begins by highlighting why scholars should care about deliberation within parties, discussing several functions intra-party deliberation is said to serve in the democratic theory literature. It then goes on to explore the deliberative credentials of political discussion between party members, drawing on group interviews with party members in two Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria. Two issues are investigated: the preconditions for deliberation among party members and their justificatory patterns. The results of the analysis suggest that parties can be genuine vehicles of deliberation, and thus point towards a research programme on intra-party democracy that differs quite starkly from that which prevails.
Party cohesion is a crucial aspect of parliamentary systems, and it varies across time, parties and systems. To explain these variations, scholars have set forth the influence of macro-level and individual-level factors. Although party-level factors have also been considered, the role of party family has been overlooked. This research seeks to fill this gap. To this end, I focus on one dimension of cohesion: the extent to which legislators have internalized the norm of party loyalty. The concept of party family permits to investigate the effect of party origin and party ideology beyond a policy-based approach and left-right dimension. Using attitudinal data of 829 parliamentarians elected in 14 European national assemblies, the analysis uncovers a party family effect, particularly in the green and radical right parties. The results suggest that a greater attention should be directed towards party family as a determinant factor of legislative cohesion.
Western political parties have been in decline in recent decades and they continue to be viewed as male institutions. Despite this, electoral politics is important to the women’s movement as a means by which to advance feminist interests. This article builds upon feminist critiques of political parties by analyzing original qualitative data undertaken with feminists in the United States and United Kingdom in order to explore how activists view political parties. The research finds that although many hold negative views, in line with broader debates concerning disengagement, they also recognize the importance of electoral politics and the need to work with individual politicians. Party and feminist ideology shapes those views, whereby politicians on the left are viewed as feminist allies and those on the right are framed as strategic partners.
In a recent contribution to Party Politics, Kostadinova and Mikulska analyze women’s political representation by populist parties in Poland and Bulgaria. The presented findings for Poland suggest that the main right-wing populist party PiS (1) elected more women to parliament, (2) nominated more women to promising ballot positions, and (3) that voters of PiS were more likely to support women in the elections compared to leftists parties. We disagree with all three findings. While the first finding is due to an error in the descriptive statistics, we argue that the other two findings are the result of an inappropriate research design. We replicate the analysis based on an altered research design and show that PiS did not elect more women to parliament, did not nominate more women to promising ballot positions and that voters of PiS were not more likely to vote for female candidates.
It is commonplace to see references to parties’ manifestos as their written issue "profiles," and changes in such documents as constituting changes in the parties’ "images" or "identities," with the latter terms often used interchangeably to capture the role of platforms. This article argues, however, that projection of a party’s "image" and its "identity" are two different functions for a manifesto, not just one, and that it is important for the building and testing of theory that this distinction be maintained. Parties are, after all, addressing two audiences simultaneously with one document, and the two dimensions provide two alternative objects of change which can be used strategically to please both audiences at once.
The article employs existing manifesto-based measures of parties’ relative issue emphases and their positions on a range of issues as indicators of image and identity, respectively, and finds that the two are indeed empirically distinct. Then, an earlier test of the electoral performance hypothesis as applied to emphasis change is replicated with data designed to capture change in issue positions. The test provides evidence for the prudence of maintaining the distinction between emphasis and position as two different dimensions of party profile change.
This study explores the extent to which campaign visibility facilitates electoral participation, using data from first- and second-order elections in Britain. Our contribution to the existing literature is threefold. First, we assess whether the effects of campaign effort are conditioned by marginality, finding that campaign mobilization gets out the vote regardless of the competitiveness of the race. Second, we look at the relative ability of different campaign activities to stimulate turnout, detecting significant differences. Third, we show that the effects of campaign effort on electoral participation are rather similar in first- and second-order elections. These findings suggest that a greater level of electoral information provided by campaign activities does reduce the cost of voting. Local campaigns play a key role in bringing voters to the polls in marginal and non-marginal races and at general elections as much as at second-order elections.
Independent party tribunals (i.e. intra-party courts) can be used by both the party leadership (e.g. to discipline members) and rank-and-file members (e.g. to challenge the leadership overstepping its authority). Thus, their study offers broad insights into party conflict regulation we know little about. Integrating the literatures on party organization, intra-party democracy and judicial politics, we propose two theoretical rationales to account for tribunal decision-making (whether a case finds tribunal support): tribunal decision-making can be theorized as shaped by elite-member divisions or, alternatively, by how verdicts affect the tribunal’s own position in the organization and organizational stability generally. We test hypotheses derived from these rationales using a new data set covering 243 tribunal decisions made over the life spans of three German parties. While both rationales are empirically relevant, the ‘organizational stability rationale’ proves particularly insightful.
Understanding how coalition parties in multiparty governments divide office and policy payoffs is one of the greatest challenges in political science. Gamson’s Law predicts that ministries are allocated proportionally with the coalition members’ legislative seat holding. However, doubts remain about how differences in the valuation of portfolios affect their distribution. The challenge is not only to determine whether government parties receive their fair share of cabinet payoffs once the importance of individual ministerial posts is taken into consideration, but also to develop a measure of portfolio importance that takes time and context into account. This article proposes a new method of measuring portfolio salience using official records of cabinet appointments in the Fifth French Republic that list ministerial posts hierarchically. The result is a more nuanced measure of portfolio importance, which is context sensitive and varies with time. The article argues that the new measure is able to reduce artificial deviations from the one-to-one linkage of seat shares and portfolio shares and that it can travel beyond the French case.
Studies of foreign direct investment’s (FDI’s) determinants focus on irreversibility as the main source of governments’ credibility problems. Here, we highlight an underexplored source of time-inconsistency dilemmas: geographic agglomeration within a country. FDI’s tendency to agglomerate creates visible inequalities in the country and generates demands for geographic income redistribution. Unchecked, such redistributive pressures can dissuade investors from entering the country altogether. Not all political systems are equally vulnerable, however. Countries with regionalized party systems are relatively unattractive to investors because regionalism increases the probability that investment returns from one region will be appropriated by the national government and used for geographic-based income redistribution. Countries with national parties, however, are less likely to engage in such behavior. Thus, we predict higher FDI inflows in countries with nationalized party systems and lower inflows in countries characterized by regional parties. Evidence from democracies between 1975 and 2007 supports our argument and its posited causal mechanisms.
The present article examines the fulfillment of election pledges. More specifically, it focuses on the effect of resources (jurisdiction, time, and money) on the parties’ abilities to fulfill their promises. Based on the case of Austria (1990–2013), the analyses cover almost 1700 pledges made in the run-up to six national elections. The multivariate models show that resources have an impact on a government’s policy outcome. The chances of pledge fulfillment decrease if the Austrian Länder is involved in the policy-making process. Furthermore, while higher levels of pledge fulfillment are associated with regularly ended legislative periods, snap elections reduce the amount of fulfilled pledges. Finally, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment increases in times of stronger economic growth. Especially pledges to expand government spending are more likely to be acted upon when the economy performs well.
Due to the politicization of much policymaking in the European Union (EU) policymaking and the growing competences of the European Parliament (EP), party groups in the EP have become key targets for organized interests. This article investigates which party groups in the EP are prioritized by EU lobbyists and why. The focus is on two presumed key components of this prioritization process, namely power and position. It is expected that lobbyists take into account both the extent to which parties align with their views and their legislative power. The empirical analysis draws on interviews with 143 interest group officials and their lobbying expenditures on 78 legislative proposals initiated by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. The analysis suggests that the media prominence of party groups in relation to specific issues as well as the extent to which interest organizations and party groups adopt opposing policy positions considerably shape how party groups in the EP are targeted by lobbyists.
The success of the Italian party Five Star Movement (M5S) has been broadly attributed to its ability to occupy the space of radical protest against "old politics". Due to the party’s criticism, its charismatic leadership, and its aggressive electoral campaigns, the M5S has been labeled as a populist. The unexpected result of 2013 election raises crucial theoretical questions: To what extent does the M5S electorate reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To what extent was it also a vote driven by values, by individual evaluations on a specific political issue? The first part of the article aims to investigate the extent of negative political feelings among M5S’ voters. To disentangle the meaning and impact of protest, we distinguish two dimensions: the "system discontent" and the "élite discontent," referring to both general and focalized images, sentiments toward and the representation of political institutions, voter power, and government performances. In the second part, we bring to the analysis a further explanation based on the theory of issue voting. The goal is to measure whether voters have chosen M5S purely because of their political resentment or also given that they shared a similar position on a number of crucial policies emphasized in the electoral campaign.
The literature on far right parties emphasizes the importance of party organization for electoral persistence. Yet, a lot is still unknown about the organizational development of these parties. This article examines the microdynamics of organizational development and explores why some party organizations succeed and others fail. It focuses on the local rather than the national level and analyzes grassroots activities rather than party leadership, institutions, or members. To analyze organizational development, the article uses an original and unique data set of 3594 activities of the Greek Golden Dawn (GD) supplemented by interviews with the GD leadership and activists as well as with evidence from hundreds of newspaper reports. It uses this evidence to trace local party activism and to document variation in local organizational outcomes. To account for why some local party organizations succeed or fail, it suggests that, rather than solely following electoral logic, the organizational development of far right parties also relates to the way they respond to challenges from antifascist groups and state authorities.
This study uses empirical evidence from a nearly comprehensive set of electoral democracies that use single-member plurality systems or mixed electoral systems with single-member plurality components in order to establish empirically the impact of territorial patterns of electoral support upon vote-to-seat conversion. The analysis, employing individual parties as units of analysis and multiple linear regression with cluster-robust standard errors as its main methodological tool, confirms the hypothesis that single-member plurality rules give a representational bonus to parties with low levels of nationalization. This effect is contingent upon absolute and relative party size, so that very large parties, and particularly frontrunners in party competition, receive an advantage irrespective of their nationalization. Mixed electoral rules further facilitate their advantage, while the gains of very small parties tend to be enhanced by large assembly size. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of party system development under Duvergerian conditions.
The article explores the relationship between the incentives of parties to campaign on valence issues and the ideological proximity between one party and its competitors. Building from the existing literature, we provide a novel theoretical model that investigates this relationship in a two-dimensional multiparty system. Our theoretical argument is then tested focusing on the 2014 European electoral campaign in the five largest European countries, through an analysis of the messages posted by parties in their official Twitter accounts. Our results highlight an inverse relationship between a party’s distance from its neighbors and its likelihood to emphasize valence issues. However, as suggested in our theoretical framework, this effect is statistically significant only with respect to valence positive campaigning. Our findings have implications for the literature on valence competition, electoral campaigns, and social media.
Using data from the Electoral Integrity Project, we measure the level of gerrymandering according to country expert surveys in Lower House elections in 54 democracies from the second half of 2012 until the first half of 2015. We show that majoritarian systems are more prone to gerrymandering than mixed-member and above all in Proportional Representation (PR) systems. When majoritarian systems are employed in large countries, gerrymandering is exacerbated. Per capita GDP and the age of electoral systems do not significantly affect gerrymandering.
Do political parties’ shifts on sociocultural issues, which signify the withdrawal of ideological commitment and disturb their supporters, cause vote loss? We argue that the negative electoral impact of positional shifts is constrained by party supporters’ opinion as well as parties’ ideological strength on sociocultural issues. Using data on party positions and ideologies in Western Europe from 1990 to 2008, we find that only parties holding strong ideologies on sociocultural issues lose votes by shifting their positions on these issues. Even these parties, however, do not lose votes when their position shifts in the same direction as that of their supporters. The results indicate that niche parties are straightforwardly affected by position shifts regarding sociocultural issues; they should adopt different strategies between values they endorse and those they reject; and political parties should not be worried about vote loss from position shifts as long as they follow their supporters’ opinions.
Parliamentary entry on the national level is a crucial achievement for any new party. But its repercussions are not necessarily beneficial. This article assesses the electoral consequences of parliamentary breakthrough by theorizing factors that shape (a) a new party organization’s capacity to cope with pressures generated by parliamentary entry and (b) the relative intensity of the new functional pressures a new party is exposed to after breakthrough. To test our hypotheses derived from these two rationales, we apply multilevel analyses to a new data set covering 135 organizationally new parties that entered national parliament across 17 advanced democracies over nearly five decades (1968–2015). Our findings stress the importance of party organizational characteristics (party origin, time for party building and leadership continuity) for parties’ capacity to sustain electoral support after breakthrough. In contrast, the intensity of functional pressures as generated by government participation immediately after breakthrough does not have significant effects on parties’ performance at the follow-up election.
It is widely assumed that political parties need to have members in order to fulfil their functions in a representative democracy (drawing up platforms, candidate nomination and electoral mobilization) and in terms of their legitimacy. However, the theoretical literature on party models – the evolution from the mass party to the catch-all party, the electoral-professional party and/or the cartel party – suggests an increasing marginalization of members within the party organization. In the business-firm party model, members no longer have any role whatsoever. The next phase in this development seems to be a party without members. This article analyses the contextual (societal, communicational and institutional) factors favouring the rise and endurance of the memberless party as well as the strategic conditions for doing without formal membership (such as maximizing the centralization of internal decision-making, promoting party unity and enhancing electoral effectiveness). The functioning of two no-member parties – the Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the Lega dei Ticinesi in Switzerland – will be discussed in the empirical part of this article.
How does governing in coalitions affect coalition parties’ responsiveness to voters? In this article, we seek to understand the relationship between political parties’ participation in multiparty governments and their responsiveness to voters. We argue that the extent to which coalition parties respond to policy priorities of voters is influenced by the divisiveness of policy issues within the cabinet and the ministerial responsibility for policies. To test our hypotheses, we combine data on the issue attention of 55 coalition parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on government composition and data on the policy priorities of voters from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various election studies in 45 elections across 16 European countries from 1972 to 2011. While we find that intra-cabinet divisiveness decreases coalition parties’ responsiveness, we find no effect for portfolio responsibility. Our findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments and its implications for political representation.
This article develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the ‘promissory agenda’) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected events and the emergence of new problems (i.e. the ‘anticipatory agenda’). Parties elected to office also have incentives to respond to issues prioritized by the platforms of their rivals. To test this theory, time series cross-sectional models are used to investigate how the policy content of the legislative program of British government responds to governing and opposition party platforms, the executive agenda, issue priorities of the public and mass media.
Based on agenda-setting, priming and issue ownership theory, we know that issue ownership and party visibility in the news can be used as strategies to affect electoral support. Thus far, it is, however, unclear whether these effects are independent or work interactively. This study aims to fill this gap. We focus on the Partij voor de Vrijheid, the prominent Dutch right-wing populist party, and draw upon an experimental design in which we exposed a sample of Dutch voters (N = 600) to media coverage on one of four issues – an owned issue, an unowned issue, an issue owned by another party and a contested issue – featuring either a party cue or not. The results indicate that the impact of issue coverage is moderated by party cues: attention to owned issues and unowned issues increases support only when party cues are present. Attention to contested and trespassing issues does not increase support.
The divide between government and opposition is clearly visible in the way members of parliament vote, but the variation in government–opposition voting has been left relatively unexplored. This is particularly the case for contextual variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide. This article attempts to explain levels of government–opposition voting by looking at three factors: first, the majority status of cabinets (differentiating between majority and minority cabinets), cabinet ideology (differentiating between more centrist and more extremist cabinets) and norms about cabinet formation (differentiating between wholesale and partial alternation in government). The study includes variation at the level of the country, the government and the vote. The article examines voting in the Netherlands (with a history of partial alternation) and Sweden (with a history of wholesale alternation). We find strong support for the effect of cabinet majority status, cabinet ideology and norms about cabinet formation on government–opposition voting.
This article introduces a novel data set on the agenda of the Turkish legislature and political parties. Using the Comparative Agendas Project approach, we trace political issue attention over an 11–year-period (2003–2013). By topic coding various political activities, this approach illustrates the dynamics of the Turkish political agenda and the issue attention of the political parties, and, therefore, sheds new empirical light on the dynamics of Turkish legislative politics and party competition. In this article, we explain the construction of the data set from data collection to coding, describe its features, and provide examples of possible applications.
This study applies black box scaling to the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey 2013 to shed light on an emerging right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The scaling procedure extracts two meaningful and robust ideological dimensions described as socialism versus liberalism and libertarian versus authoritarian. Placing the ideal point of candidates from all parties into this two-dimensional space shows that AfD candidates are significantly more market liberal than Christian Democratic Union candidates but not more authoritarian. On these grounds, the AfD can hardly be regarded as a right-wing extremist party. Yet exploring ideological heterogeneity within parties indicates that East German AfD candidates are generally more authoritarian than their West German colleagues, highlighting a potential source of the party’s recent shift from primarily Eurosceptic toward more nationalist conservative positions.
We analyze the remarkable differences in the electoral success of new parties and compare the determinants of electoral volatility attributable to new versus established parties. We base our findings on an original data set of total volatility, extra-system volatility, and within-system volatility for 67 democratic countries across all regions of the world since 1945.
The article makes three contributions. First, we show that it is important to distinguish between electoral volatility that represents vote shifts among established parties (within-system volatility) and shifts to new parties (extra-system volatility). Second, we provide descriptive information about total, within-system, and extra-system volatility for 67 countries. Third, we analyze the determinants of volatility. Our results show that the causes of within- and extra-system volatility differ markedly. In contrast to Powell and Tucker, for our broader range of countries and longer time period, there are several statistically robust positive findings.
This study investigates the impact of emigration on the political behavior of citizens in Egypt. In particular, it argues that emigrants’ family members are more likely to vote for Salafi parties for several reasons, including the transfer of religious remittances by Egyptian emigrants to the Gulf and the influence of transnational Salafi networks. In order to test our argument, we conducted an original public opinion survey with around 1100 individuals between January 12, 2012 and January 25, 2012, just after the Egyptian parliamentary election. We find that individuals with family members who had emigrated to the Gulf voted heavily for Islamist parties, particularly the Freedom and Justice Party and the Nour Party. Further analysis shows that there is no statistical difference between individuals with and without emigrant family members in voting for the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Nour’s popularity among voters with emigrant family members is substantial and statistically significant. In particular, we find that the strongest support for the Nour came from individuals whose family members had immigrated to Saudi Arabia, whereas those whose family members had immigrated to other countries, including other Gulf countries, do not differ significantly from non-emigrant family members in their party preferences.
This study investigates the voting behavior of Korean the electorate using Dalton’s four concepts of contemporary voters. We demonstrate that cognitive partisans, who possess strong party identification and high levels of cognitive skills, respond to regional party cue and ideology when voting. Ritual partisans and cognitive partisans behave alike but, for ritual partisans, ideology plays a diminished role due to their low cognitive skills. Two independent groups—apartisans and apoliticals—are prone to swing votes from election to election. Unlike apoliticals, apartisans are influenced by ideology as they possess higher levels of cognitive abilities. Our findings suggest that Dalton’s framework can be useful to understand voting patterns of electorates in new democracies as well as advanced democracies.
The polarization of political parties in the United States is a well-documented phenomenon. This paper considers polarization of the judicial branch and relates it to the evolution of the parties. In this paper we define polarization specifically as movement from a modal distribution (of votes, attitudes, or decisions) to a bimodal distribution along a liberal-conservative spectrum over time. Using data compiled from 90,000 United States District Court decisions published in the Federal Supplement between 1934 and 2008, we find that the judiciary began to polarize in the 1960s and has remained polarized. We consider a number of competing explanations for the polarization of the district courts, including a top-down view that emphasizes presidential power and a bottom-up view that focuses on the sorting of elites that form the pool of potential judges.
Negative campaigning presents parties with a collective action problem. While parties would prefer to have their competitors attacked, potential backlash effects from negative messages mean that individual politicians typically lack the incentives to carry out such attacks. We theorize that parties solve this problem by implementing a division of labour that takes into account the incentives of individual office holders, their availability for campaign activity, and media relevance. Drawing on these arguments we expect that holders of high public office and party leaders are less likely to issue attacks, leaving the bulk of the ‘dirty work’ to be carried out by party floor leaders and general secretaries. Examining almost 8000 press releases issued by over 600 individual politicians during four election campaigns in Austria, we find strong support for our theoretical expectations.
Focusing on Bulgaria, and covering the 1990–2009 period, this article analyses what factors predict if print media will report election promises made by political parties. The study utilizes two original datasets. One consists of 3083 pledges made by 15 parties ahead of seven elections. The second dataset includes news stories published by six newspapers during each election campaign. The analysis reveals that pledges made by the main political opponents during each election are more likely to be published than those by smaller parties. Pledges related to economic policy are also more likely to be discussed in the news than other types of pledges, although the opposite is true regarding promises related specifically to the country’s economic transition. Finally, in their reporting of pledges, print media do not reflect the salient ideological priorities of political parties.
Issue congruence between citizens and policy makers should be one of the central aspects of a democratic process. This study uses the 2009 European Election Study to compare the views of citizens and party elites on a diverse set of domestic policy issues and overall Left-Right identities. We find very high levels of congruence for Left-Right positions and socio-economic issues. Parties are less representative of their supporters on the newer cultural issues of immigration and authority, as well as gender issues. National political contexts have limited influence on congruence levels, although some party characteristics such as political extremism or party family are linked to citizen-voter agreement. On the whole, citizens and like-minded parties do connect through the electoral process to a high degree. However, the results also argue for a multidimensional approach to assessing representation to recognize where parties agree and deviate from their supporters.
Political parties are in a unique situation, being able to change electoral rules and regulations to minimise any potential negative effects on their electoral prospects. Attempts to influence regulators, however, can be complex and include voicing concerns, public pressure and the regulatory capture of electoral regulators. Little is known about this relationship between parties and their regulators. This article focuses on this crucial electoral relationship through a study of political parties’ relations with the UK Electoral Commission. The first section addresses the background to the legal regulation of political parties. The second section proposes a framework through which parties’ reactions to regulation may be understood. The third part introduces the British case, providing evidence to demonstrate the broad utility of the framework. The final section analyses the issues that parties have raised with their regulators.
Parties often enter pre-election coalitions (PECs) in presidential elections while remaining independent in legislative races. Parties that support a presidential candidate should see legislative gains given the increase in their national electoral profile. Yet fewer presidential candidates often leads to fewer legislative parties, suggesting that participation in PECs reduces parties’ independent legislative representation. In this article, we examine how specific strategies in the presidential race affect parties’ legislative vote share. Using an original dataset of over 2300 party-level observations in 23 democracies across Europe and South America from 1975 to 2010, we show that the benefits of a party’s presidential strategy are conditional on its size. We find that smaller parties benefit from coattails when they run on their own or lead a PEC, while no parties benefit from joining a PEC. Our findings have important implications for understanding how parties’ presidential strategies influence their legislative success and system-level legislative fragmentation.
A paradox in the comparative literature on electoral systems is that one of the most common systems in Europe – flexible-list proportional representation systems – may be the least understood. Any study of flexible-list systems must start by acknowledging a puzzle: why candidates spend time and effort striving to win preference votes when typically these votes make no difference between election and defeat. Offering the first comprehensive multi-country test of this key puzzle, we provide evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia that parties will promote to better list ranks in the next election those candidates who are successful at winning preference votes, thereby improving their prospects of election in the longer term and incentivizing them to cultivate personal reputations. Our findings have important implications for party scholars and practitioners when designing, or reforming, political institutions.
What are the dynamics of partisan rhetoric in presidential campaigns? (How) has presidential candidate partisanship changed over time? Analyzing a comprehensive dataset of party-related statements in presidential campaign speeches over the 1952–2012 period, we show that Democratic and Republican candidates have taken distinctive approaches to partisanship. Overall, Democratic candidates have been partisans, while Republicans have largely refrained from partisan rhetoric on the campaign trail. However, this difference has narrowed substantially over time, due to a dramatic decline in the partisanship of Democratic presidential candidates. We argue that Democratic and Republican candidates have adopted different campaign strategies that reflect both enduring party differences and changing political contexts. Though naturally inclined to partisanship, Democratic candidates have adopted more conciliatory strategies primarily in response to growing public antipathy toward partisan rancor. In contrast, Republicans’ tendency toward more conciliatory rhetoric has been reinforced by political developments discouraging partisan campaigning.
The micro-foundations of party unity are still an understudied topic in comparative politics. This article explores the effects of political ambition on party loyalty in Members of the Chamber of Deputies’ (MCDs) claimed votes based on attitudinal data. Ambition theory posits that ambitious politicians should act according to the (s)electorate they are aiming to win for the next election, therefore acting prospectively in their legislative votes. Findings suggest that MCDs seeking office in the national executive branch are more likely to follow the party line and less likely to side with their district or vote inconsistently. While inclusiveness of candidate selection procedures alone does not have an effect, its interaction with differing ambitions does. The results provide us with a first systematic analysis of ambition and its effect on party loyalty in 14 countries by examining the individual MCD more closely.
Content analyses of televised debates indicate that candidates often attack each other. Unfortunately, we know very little about when candidates go negative. Furthermore, most research is focusing on the United States. This paper contributes in several ways to our understanding of when candidates choose negative messages. First, we identify some previously unnoticed factors and assign them to three broad categories: a candidate’s (personal and political) profile, the debate format, and the strategic context of a debate. Second, we use a unique data set based on all German televised debates. Third, we run multivariate models to investigate which variables are responsible for the use of attacks. Our results indicate that attacks are very popular. Candidates attack if they belong to the opposition, if they compete at the national level, and if they are behind in the polls. In addition, personality can affect the use of attacks.
The architects of the European project made a significant effort to create a set of symbols for the community (such as the EU flag, the map of Europe, the anthem, etc.), and recent evidence suggests that the main European values are nowadays spontaneously associated with them. We know little, however, about if and when national political actors choose to display these symbolic visual manifestations of Europe. In this study, we examine the presence of such symbols in parties’ Euromanifestos since the first European elections. The presence of EU community symbols is correlated with several factors, suggesting that the display is consistent both with a policy-driven and with a vote-seeking logic. We explore at length the implications of these results for future visual analysis of parties’ European messages and for the larger issue of European identity.
Recent research has indicated that social heterogeneity impacts party system size, even in restrictive settings. This research as yet has not established whether it is minority or majority voters who are behaving outside Duvergerian expectations. This study argues that it is ethnic voters that seem to defect from their parties at lower rates, which explains why small parties proliferate and persist in heterogeneous states. This hypothesis is tested on party-in-district level election returns in the German lander Schleswig-Holstein. The results show that small ethnic parties suffer notably less defection than small non-ethnic parties. The study proposes a number of potential causal mechanisms that could be driving ethnic voters, as a group, to defect at lower rates than non-ethnic voters.
Contrary to longstanding arguments that equate parties with durable, information-rich brand names, the relabeling of parties is not rare, and in many countries it is not even very unusual. This paper provides the first effort to document this neglected phenomenon. It finds that across European democracies roughly a third of all parties have relabeled themselves at least once since 1945, and a similar proportion of elections include at least one party running under a new name. It then presents analyses of why parties change names more frequently in some circumstances, finding support for three explanations derived from the existing literature: parties with longer-standing brands are less likely to shed them, but relabeling is more likely for parties that suffer electoral setbacks and for parties in weaker party systems. Finally, it presents evidence that the end of Soviet communism made left parties more likely to rename themselves.
This paper examines the consequences of the far-right in shaping foreign-born immigrants’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in their host country. It posits that while electorally successful far-right parties undermine democracy satisfaction, the magnitude of this effect is not uniform across all first-generation immigrants. Instead, it depends on newcomers’ citizenship status in their adopted homeland. The analyses using individual-level data collected as part of the five-round European Social Survey (ESS) 2002–2012 in 16 West European democracies reveal that the electoral strength of far-right parties in a form of vote and seat shares won in national elections is indeed powerfully linked to democracy satisfaction among foreign-born individuals. However, this relationship is limited to foreign-born non-citizens, as we have no evidence that far-right parties influence democracy attitudes among foreign-born individuals who have acquired citizenship in their adopted homeland.
For over 40 years now, the debate on the hierarchical opinion structure within political parties has been colored by May’s laws of General and Special curvilinear disparity. Their essence is that, compared to non-leaders and top leaders, the mid-level of sub-leaders of parties consists of radicals as regards their ideological, substantive positions. Persistent as this vision is, however, there have been few comprehensive empirical tests. In this paper such a test is employed for Dutch parties, consisting of: a) a comparison of average positions on issues and in terms of left and right of voters, members and MPs; b) a comparison of the full opinion distributions on particular political issues for these groups; and c) an exploration of perceptions among top leaders and sub-leaders of the opinion structure within their party. We conclude that there is not enough support to uphold May’s laws any longer. His laws should be dismissed, but May’s legacy should consist of a more open study of the opinion structures of parties, which are still crucial actors in Western representative democracies.
Our paper addresses why a moderate presidential candidate would select an extreme running mate, as was the case in the 2012 US presidential election. To address this question, we designed a one-dimensional policy game in which a moderate challenger uses their vice-presidential candidate as a policy tool to alter the median voter participating in the election. Our main conclusion is that the median voter is altered through a mobilization effect, by increasing own party turnout through the convincing of the more extreme segment of a party to participate in the election, rather than altering the voter’s decision to vote for a particular candidate. This decision function only has a marginal effect on independent voters. Our conclusion is in line with recent empirical advances in the literature and our paper aims to more formally ground these advancements in theory. We developed a set of comparative statics to apply the theory of running mate selection more broadly, germane beyond the case of the 2012 presidential election used to frame this topic. Our model also determines the optimal difference between the platforms of a challenger and their vice-presidential candidate.
Using electoral data from a nearly comprehensive set of the world’s electoral democracies (1992–2014), including 131 independent countries and one non-sovereign territory, this article develops an explanatory model of legislative fragmentation that incorporates electoral fragmentation, the territorial patterns of party support, district magnitude, specific electoral system effects, and the balance of personal and party vote components within the incentive structures generated by electoral rules. The analysis proves that there is a strong negative association between the territorial homogeneity of the vote and legislative fragmentation, and shows that those varieties of electoral rules that increase the salience of personal component in party-centred elections tend to enhance legislative fragmentation. Due to its statistical properties, the model allows for establishing the impact of each of the factors, as well as their relative weights, with a high degree of certainty.
Do parties adapt their programmatic strategies in times of heightened economic globalization? Are these changes captured by right-left positional changes or do parties go beyond policy shifts and enact more comprehensive programmatic overhauls? Furthermore, are such changes linked to traditional party family classifications and, if so, do different party types reprogram their manifestos differently? Finally, what role does radical right competition play in the changing programmatic strategies of mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties? This paper addresses these questions by developing a theoretical framework that accounts for economic globalization, cleavage change, and programmatic supply. Using Giebler et al.’s (2015) measure of programmatic clarity, the analysis reveals clear differences in party responses to economic globalization. Additionally, the results show that parties go beyond right-left positional changes and adapt their programmatic supply on a more general level. For social democratic parties, however, such adaptation hinges on whether a radical right competitor is present.
This article examines whether the support for Eurosceptic challenger parties influences mainstream party position change on European integration in Western Europe. The key finding is that Eurosceptic challenger support is capable of influencing mainstream position shifts on European integration provided that, on average, EU issues are regarded as important by the Eurosceptic challengers. Moreover, the centre-left is more affected by Eurosceptic contagion since it is influenced by both radical right and radical left Eurosceptic success, whereas the centre-right is only susceptible to radical right success. The empirical analyses are based on panel regression analysis employing expert survey data provided by Chapel Hill Expert Survey. The findings presented in this article have important implications for the study of party positioning on European integration as well as for the study of party competition in general.
This paper addresses the electoral consequences of the German government’s anti-nuclear power policy shift after the Fukushima accident. Building on a cost-benefit framework and insights from political psychology, the theoretical analysis anticipates that the policy shift could not earn governing parties additional votes but could avoid vote loss. Utilizing data from multiple surveys and employing simulation techniques, the evidence demonstrates that voters, in particular incumbents’ supporters, became more skeptical of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. At the same time, governing parties’ supporters were particularly eager to perceive a credible change in the government’s nuclear power stance. As a consequence, governing parties did not garner additional votes but inhibited their supporters from voting for other parties and thus avoided vote loss. Generally speaking, the novel approach proposed in this paper is suitable for shedding light on electoral effects of parties’ policy shifts that have thus far gone unnoticed.
Previous research dismisses the possibility that populist, male-dominated parties could positively affect gender equality. Yet, evidence from Eastern Europe points at the opposite: Center-rightist formations, led by notable men, have effectively nominated women to office. What can explain such a puzzling phenomenon? This study argues that i) the centralized structure and practices in these populist parties make it possible to avoid the reluctance of gatekeepers to let female candidates run; and that ii) regardless of ideological or cultural predispositions, supporters loyally approve the nomination decisions made by their charismatic leader. We analyze data on three populist parties in Bulgaria and Poland. Our findings confirm that these formations elected more women than the leftist parties because of strategies to nominate female candidates higher on the list. Voters were also more likely to favor female candidates in the open-list system in Poland.
New-Flemish Alliance (N-VA) burst on the scene barely a decade ago and is now Belgium’s largest political party. One explanation for this success is that N-VA is not brand new but rose from the ashes of a dissolved party. How exactly should we differentiate between new and old parties? We use Barnea and Rahat’s (2011) analytical framework to assess dimensions of N-VA’s newness and capture the party at two stages – start-up and more developed. This shows that N-VA is a successor party, building on its predecessor’s ideology and programme, its electorate, activists and organization. However, we also find indicators that the party actively renewed in terms of ideology and party organization. The empirical evidence illustrates that newness of political parties should be conceived of as multi-dimensional, which allows for a more subtle approach to questions about the origin and varying success of new political parties.
The transformation of rebel groups into political parties has captured the attention of scholars of both conflict studies and of party transformation. In this paper we examine the question of rebel party image change by investigating the causes of name changes adopted by a rebel organization as it transforms into a political party after the end of a civil conflict. We develop an analytical framework based upon the extensive literature on party identity change in the West, and apply it to the name changes of rebel parties. Using an original data set of 54 former rebel organizations, we find that factors internal to the organization (such as the degree of inclusivity and the origins of the rebel organization) explain name change more than factors related to the post conflict environment.
Despite a great flourishing of studies about Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, the issue of party system institutionalization has been widely neglected in Western Europe, where the presence of stable and predictable patterns of interactions among political actors has been generally taken for granted for a long time. Nevertheless, party system institutionalization is not something that can be gained once and for all. This article proposes a theoretical reconceptualization and a new empirical operationalization of party system (de-)institutionalization. Furthermore, it tests the presence of patterns of de-institutionalization in Western Europe from 1945 to (March) 2015 (336 elections in 19 countries) by using an original database of electoral volatility and of its internal components (regeneration and alteration). Data analysis shows that Western Europe is facing great electoral instability and party system regeneration and that many countries have experienced sequences of party system de-institutionalization, especially in the last two decades.
Scholars in comparative politics often assume that political parties are the primary instruments for translating citizens’ preferences into specific policy outcomes. However, the crucial but often forgotten link between preferences, parties, and outcomes is the bureaucracy. Are bureaucrats able to affect policy outside of parties’ control? And, if so, how does this bureaucratic policy drift differ across institutional contexts? I argue that institutions that regulate the nomination process by which parties in government select bureaucrats (meritocratic versus partisan recruitment) determine the levels of bureaucratic influence on the policy making process, specifically in terms of policy change. I test my theoretical argument using two large cross-national datasets on budget allocations and policy stability. I find that bureaucratic professionalism partially explains changes in allocation to the "ideological" budgetary categories and is positively correlated with policy stability around the world.
How is populism distributed over the political spectrum? Are right-wing parties more populist than left-wing parties? Based on the analysis of 32 parties in five Western European countries between 1989 and 2008, we show that radical parties on both the left and the right are inclined to employ a populist discourse. This is a striking finding, because populism in Western Europe has typically been associated with the radical right; only some particular radical left parties have been labeled populist as well. This article suggests that the contemporary radical left in Western Europe is generally populist. Our explanation is that many contemporary radical left parties are not traditionally communist or socialist (anymore). They do not focus on the ‘proletariat’, but glorify a more general category: the ‘good people’. Moreover, they do not reject the system of liberal democracy as such, but only criticize the political and/or economic elites within that system.
The African party literature, especially research prescribing to the long-dominant ethnic voting thesis, has asserted that African party systems exhibit low levels of party nationalization. However, systematic research on nationalization across parties and party systems is still lacking. This study argues that the prospects for building nationalized parties vary substantially between incumbent and opposition parties. Incumbent parties, with their access to state resources, have been successful in creating nationwide operations, even in countries where geographical factors have been unfavorable and where ethnic fractionalization is high. The analysis utilizes a new data set of disaggregate election results for 26 African countries to calculate nationalization scores for 77 parties and study the correlates of party nationalization. The results show that factors like ethnic fractionalization, the size of the geographical area, and urbanization affect party nationalization, but only in the case of opposition parties. Incumbent parties, on the other hand, generally remain nationalized despite unfavorable structural conditions.
When elections are free and fair, why do some political parties rule for prolonged periods of time? Most explanations for single-party dominance focus on the dominant party’s origins, resources, or strategies. In this article, we show how opposition parties can undermine or sustain single-party dominance. Specifically, opposition parties should be central in explaining single-party dominance in countries with highly disproportional electoral systems and a dominant party whose vote share falls short of a popular majority. Employing a quantitative analysis of Indian legislative elections as well as a paired case study, we show that opposition coordination plays a crucial part in undermining single-party dominance.
The popularity function literature has traditionally focused on incumbent government support, even under coalition governments. Here, we shift the focus from the government to the parties. To what extent are German parties held accountable for economic conditions when they hold the Chancellorship, serve in coalition, or sit in opposition? Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression to relax the Constant Economic Vote Restriction, we simultaneously model separate monthly party support functions for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), Social Democrats (SPD), Liberals (FDP), and Greens over the post-unification period. After controlling for temporal dynamics and political factors, we find that economic evaluations have the strongest effect on support for the SPD and CDU/CSU when they hold the Chancellorship, and both of these parties are strongly affected when in opposition. The FDP remains insulated from economic perceptions, despite the party’s emphasis on economic policy. Additionally, economic evaluations do not significantly change support for the Greens as an issue party.
The paper brings theoretical and empirical contributions to the scholarship on dimensions of politics in Europe. On the theoretical side it emphasizes the differences between Western and Eastern countries; we argue that while in Western Europe the main dimension of political conflict is the economic left-right, in Eastern Europe the main dimension is more likely to encompass cultural issues associated primarily with what in the Western literature is known as the secondary, social left-right. We trace the origin of this difference in the 1990s when parties in Eastern Europe chose to emphasize cultural issues to appeal to an electorate unfamiliar with capitalist economics and dissatisfied with the economic left associated with Communism and the economic right associated with painful reforms. To test this assertion we apply the Optimal Classification vote scaling method to an original dataset of over 24,000 votes from 22 European parliaments; the statistical tests support the hypothesis.
Scholars’ attention to the concept of niche parties has greatly increased. While researchers agree that niche parties matter in a variety of ways, the definitions and measurements of such parties are manifold and an accordance remains yet to be found. I argue the given conceptualizations of niche parties (a) suffer from gaps between their measurements and theoretical concepts or (b) conceptual clarity. The theoretical concept I propose understands niche parties as (a) predominantly competing on niche market segments neglected by their competitors and (b) not discussing a broad range of these segments. By measuring exactly these two components in an additive index drawn from the MARPOR data, the validation shows that parties emphasizing niche segments differentiate themselves from their competitors also by using a condensed message on these segments. In particular, this component of party competition, the specialization of party offers, has not been studied in the literature on niche parties and should receive more attention.
Scholarship on far right parties in Post-Communist Europe has borrowed findings and analytical frameworks from studies on the Western European far right. Similarly, studies on Western European far right parties have increasingly referenced instances of far right success in post-communist states. These parties are similar in their Euroskepticism and exclusionary populism. However, little work has compared voters for the far right between regions. Different political opportunity structures have consequences for far right voter profiles in four important respects. First, the linkage between anti-immigrant attitudes and far right support is stronger in Western Europe. Second, far right voters in Western Europe are less religious than their post-communist counter-parts. Third, post-communist far right voters are economic leftists, whereas rightist attitudes toward income redistribution slightly predict a far right vote in Western Europe. Finally, far right voters in Western Europe are less satisfied with democracy as a regime type.
Do electoral systems and intra-party candidate selection procedures influence the degree to which parties act in unison? Whereas the theoretical literature is quite clear about the hypothetical effect of these institutions, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I solve the puzzle and theorize about the interactive effects of elections and selections on parties’ behavior. I argue that the effect of candidate selections depends on the electoral environment within which they operate. Specifically, in an electoral environment that creates incentives for candidate-centeredness, the less restrictive the selection method a party uses, the less unified its record; whereas in an electoral environment that emphasizes party-centeredness, the effect of selections on unity is more muted. Using the electoral reform and divergent selection mechanisms characterizing Israel during the last three decades and utilizing Rice Scores, I provide support for the conditional effect of electoral systems and selection procedures on party behavior.
Throughout the years, political scientists have devised a multitude of techniques to position political parties on various ideological and policy/issue dimensions. So far, however, none of these techniques was able to evolve into a "gold standard" in party positioning. Against this background, one could recently witness the appearance of a new methodology for party positioning tightly connected to the spread of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), i.e. an iterative method that aims at improving existing techniques using a combination of party self-placement and expert judgement. Such a method, as pioneered by the Dutch Kieskompas, was first systematically employed on a large cross-national scale by the EU Profiler VAA in the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. This article introduces the party placement datasets generated by euandi (reads: EU and I), a transnational VAA for the 2014 EP elections. The scientific relevance of the euandi endeavour lies primarily in its choice to stick to the iterative method of party positioning employed by the EU Profiler in 2009 as well as in the choice to keep as many as 17 policy statements in the 2014 questionnaire in order to allow for cross-national, longitudinal research on party competition in Europe across a five-year period. This article provides a brief review of traditional methods of party positioning and contrasts them to the iterative method employed by the euandi team. It then introduces the specifics of the project, facts and figures of the data collection procedure, and the details of the resulting dataset encompassing 242 parties from the whole EU28.
The minimal effect theory of campaign studies stipulates that intense political competition during campaigns assures and reinforces the initial party choice of the electorate. We find that this reinforcement is two-fold. During the campaign, the party preference of the voters’ in-group party increases while the party preference of the voters’ out-group parties decreases. Voters’ preference for their most preferred party (MPP) increases during the election campaign, while their preference for their least liked party decreases during the campaign (LPP). Across parties voters experience an increase in their preference for their most preferred party and a decrease for their least liked party as the campaign progresses. These trends show that the political campaign polarizes the electorate by increasing the affective distance between in-group party and out-group party preferences, thereby resulting in stronger political polarization after the campaign than before the campaign. The data utilized in this study is a large six-wave panel-study of Danish voters’ party preferences during the Danish parliamentary election of 2011. Thus, the analysis provides evidence of the minimal effect theory and of political polarization within a multi-party context.
We analyze elite-level issue dynamics of culture war issues in the US from 1971 to 2008 to compare and contrast three theories of issue change: issue evolution, conflict extension, and ideological polarization. Previous studies often conflate these perspectives by only focusing on increased partisanship as evidence of issue change. We argue that these theories differ on a key aspect of issue conflict: dimensionality, that is, the relationship between political conflict on the issue in question and conflict on other issues. We analyze changes in the dimensionality of roll call voting in the US House on the environment, women’s rights, gun control, abortion, and immigration to present a more comprehensive view of issue dynamics. Our results suggest that these perspectives need further clarification and can complement one another. In particular, considering degrees of an issue evolution is beneficial. Although most issues became more partisan as they were simply absorbed into existing partisan cleavages, which is not consistent with some descriptions of an evolution, the more prominent culture war issues, such as abortion and gun control, showed more distinctive and prominent characteristics.
The literature that explores the relationship between decentralisation and the structure of the party system has barely explored an important dimension of party integration, namely the degree of ideological cohesiveness among parliamentary elites. This paper purports to fill the literature gap by analysing heterogeneity in attitudes towards devolution among representatives from Spanish state-wide parties (the People’s Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE)). Drawing from a sample of 460 parliamentary elites, results show that within-party variation in preferences towards regional self-rule are accounted by the territorial cleavage (historical regions vs ordinary ones) as well as by an institutional cleavage, defined by the type of assembly – regional or national – in which representatives are elected. However, parties’ political and organisational trajectories moderate the impact of those cleavages: territory prevails in accounting for internal variation within the PSOE, whereas the institutional cleavage is more important to explain internal cohesiveness among PP’s party elites.
This paper disentangles the relationship between election outcomes and satisfaction with democracy. As the first comparative study to employ a measure of satisfaction immediately before and after elections, we can be unusually confident that any changes we observe are attributable to election outcomes. Following previous work, we affirm that voting for parties that win more votes, more legislative seats, and more cabinet seats boosts satisfaction with democracy. In addition, we demonstrate for the first time that voters are sensitive to deficits in representation; satisfaction with democracy decreases when one’s party’s seat share falls short of its vote share.
Most studies of candidate-centered electoral systems, that encourage politicians to seek personal votes, have focused on the impact of such institutions. This paper focuses instead on their origins in new democracies. It hypothesizes that voter demands for local and individual benefits and party access to government resources for such benefits are likely to lead politicians to choose a candidate-centered electoral rule during a transition to democracy. Cross-national quantitative studies of 97 new democracies from 1950 to 2008 support these claims, revealing that (1) the poorer the average voter, the more likely a candidate-centered electoral institution will be adopted and (2) where incumbent governing parties are more influential in selecting new rules, candidate-centered electoral systems are more likely to be selected. Nonetheless, (3) in highly developed countries even those governing party members tend to opt for a party-centered system; conversely, (4) in extremely less-developed countries even opposition politicians, who would otherwise select a party-centered electoral system, are likely to choose a candidate-centered system if they are dominant at the time of writing the new institution. These findings shed light on the endogeneity of electoral systems and suggest a powerful impact of social context on institutional choice. The paper also contributes more generally to theories of electoral system choice.
Previous comparative electoral studies using aggregate data indicate the importance of party-system variables, such as polarization and the number of parties, with regard to the level of volatility between two elections. Research using individual level data has shown elements, such as political knowledge, political disaffection and party identification, that explain why voters remained faithful to their party or not. Until now, no study has investigated these variables simultaneously on individual level data using a large set of elections. This study fills that important gap in the literature using data from 29,591 voters in 33 elections. We find polarization influences party-switching at the individual level, rather than the sheer number of parties, as aggregate-level analyses suggest.
According to a popular but controversial view in contemporary party research, political parties increasingly put a premium on governing within the institutions of the state rather than on representation of interests and identities in society. This critique has been phrased most uncompromisingly in Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s theory of the cartel party, according to which the cartel party governs but does not represent, and thus fails to do what we expect of parties in a modern democracy. This article is an analysis and critique of this presupposition, which has largely escaped the attention of commentators. The idea that the cartel party governs but does not represent rests on an untenable view of political representation. As I argue, the normative problem with the cartel party is not so much that this type of party does not represent, as to decide when and how it does or does not represent.
This article examines the determinants of coalition formation on the local level. In addition to standard office- and policy-seeking variables, we incorporate the local institutional setting and the constraints on local coalition politics emerging from patterns of party competition at the superior level of the political system. We test our expectations on the basis of a dataset providing information on the characteristics of potential and formed coalitions in 29 German cities. The results show that – even on the local level, which is often described as less politicised – not only office-seeking variables but also the ideological positioning of parties are good predictors for local coalition formation in German cities. Additionally, our findings suggest that local political actors take the party affiliation of the directly elected mayor into account when forming coalitions in local councils. The findings imply that political actors on all levels of political systems try to maximise their payoffs and form coalitions accordingly.
After reviewing the theoretical underpinnings behind the ‘conventional wisdom’ that voters on the left abstain more, this article critically assesses the traditional approach of the so-called ideological bias on turnout. By compiling a new large dataset (197 country elections in Europe), this paper shows that centrist abstention is higher than leftist or rightist abstention. The analysis reveals that a society’s ideological turnout bias reflects its socioeconomic context (traditional explanation), but also that party strategies play a key role. Most importantly, results show that convergence towards the centre triggers a higher centrist abstention. Additionally, this article demonstrates that both socioeconomic and partisan factors have heterogeneous effects across ideological positions. These findings critically challenge prior understanding of the ideological bias on turnout and the impact of parties’ election strategies when pursuing the key centre voter.
Whereas many advanced democracies have a long-standing tradition of collaboration between parties and interest groups, it is still contested what drives such collaboration. Linking data on political parties with survey data from over 750 Danish and Dutch interest groups we find evidence of groups focusing on collaboration with large and ideologically moderate parties in both systems. However, our findings also indicate that the importance of power and ideology for interest group-party collaboration is conditioned by crucial aspects of the institutional context in which such collaboration occurs related to party system dynamics and coalition governance. In Denmark, where governments tend to alternate between left and right, collaboration between parties and interest groups is more likely to follow a similar left-right division. In contrast, such collaboration is more likely to reflect a division between core and marginal parties in the Netherlands, where change in government composition is typically only partial.
The popularity of European Radical Right Populist parties (RRPs) has led to investigations into the distances between RRPs’ and other parties’ stances regarding immigration. This article adds to this literature by investigating the distance between RRPs and the other parties on a wider variety of typical RRP policy and style issues. Based on an Expert Survey organized in 2010, we consider ideological (immigration, nationalism, law and order) and style (anti-establishment, populism) dimensions. Furthermore, we examine to what extent characteristics of other parties and RRPs (ideological position, electoral success, being in office) are associated with these distances. Our results show that right-wing (neo-)conservative and Christian-democratic parties are closest, while green and socialist parties are furthest to RRPs regarding ideological dimensions. The opposite is found for the style dimensions. Additionally, we show that the other parties’ characteristics, rather than those of RRPs, are associated with ideological and style distances between RRPs and other parties.
Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to estimate wrongly the magnitude of the effect of parties’ experiences in a government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties’ manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions and policy data provide additional support. These findings have important implications for the study of election strategy and democratic accountability.
Efforts to study the dynamics of legislative and party politics in developing countries often confront a serious obstacle – lack of public data on legislative actions. This paper proposes a new feasible approach for obtaining legislative information indirectly – analyzing the perceptions and lobbying behaviors of business interest groups who are experienced, knowledgeable and highly invested in staying informed on policymaking processes. I build on extant literatures on political parties and lobbying to show how we can systematically exploit group insights to study legislative parties in data-scarce environments and complement existing approaches in data-rich cases. I then demonstrate and evaluate this approach by using original data from a 2006 survey of 158 groups in a data-rich case, Brazil, to mediate existing scholarly debates regarding the sources of legislative unity of Brazilian parties.
We consider whether the manipulation of committee sizes can serve as a strategic tool of the majority party to further its influence over policy outcomes in the US House. Previous research notes the influence of the majority party’s preferences on the composition of committees but takes the size of committees as exogenous. We argue that the determination of sizes is an important first step and potential tool to shape committee composition, given vacancy constraints like the property rights norm. Using assignment and revealed legislator ideology data from the 80th to 111th Congresses, our results support this view of strategic expansion as a majority party strategy particularly for "prestige committees," which are most central to a party’s agenda. Expansion indeed results in committees that are ideologically closer to the majority caucus median.
This article explains variation in the electoral trajectories of Latin American traditional parties since transitions to democratic governments in the late 20th century until the first half of the 2000s, when democracies were already consolidated. This article addresses the question of why some parties suffer more than others under challenging contextual conditions, or why some parties are able to weather difficult external environments, e.g. economic crises, institutional reforms or political scandals, while others fail. This study argues that the internal organization of parties matters: it affects their ability to react and survive, especially in contexts of environmental change. Variation in parties’ internal characteristics explains different outcomes in their electoral performance. An empirical analysis of 48 traditional parties over almost three decades (1978–2006) provides support for this argument.
This paper analyzes how factional conflict and intra-party organization affect a party’s likelihood of being involved in a ruling coalition. We focus on Italian parties (between 1946 and 2013) estimating their internal heterogeneity through quantitative text analysis of policy documents presented by factions during party congresses. The impact of inter-factional conflict has been investigated in interaction with intra-party rules showing that when the party leader is autonomous and can rely on powerful whipping resources to impose discipline, the party will credibly sticks to the coalition agreement, thereby reducing the negative effect of factional heterogeneity in coalition bargaining.
Party cohesion in legislatures is a topic of longstanding concern to political scientists because cohesion facilitates democratic representation. We examine the cohesion of transnational party groups in the European Parliament, which is part of the EU’s bicameral system, and study the oftentimes competing pressures to which MEPs are subject from their EP party groups and national governments. Our explanation focuses on the conditions under which MEPs take policy positions that differ from those of their party groups. We propose that national governments lobby their national MEPs more intensely on issues of high national salience and on which they are in a weak bargaining position in the Council. The analyses offer a unique approach to the study of party cohesion that is based on the policy positions taken by each national delegation of MEPs in each of the three main party groups and national governments on specific controversial issues.
This paper focuses on how characteristics of parties and party voters explain the styles of representation emphasised within parties. Styles of representation are defined at the party level as the proportion of representatives within parties who are partisans, delegates or trustees. Each style manifests due to different incentives related to the characteristics of their party and/or their party voters. The findings show that the main explanatory factors for the proportion of partisans are parties’ leadership control over nomination and party socialisation. The main determinant for the proportion of trustees is how often parties have been represented in government. For delegates the results are mixed, but it is indicated that a high proportion of party identifiers among party voters is related to a high proportion of delegates within parties.
Whether people make the right choice when they vote for a given candidate or party and what factors affect the capacity to vote correctly have been recurrent questions in the political science literature. This paper contributes to this debate by looking at how the complexity of the electoral context affects voters’ capacity to vote correctly. Correct voting is defined as a vote that maximizes one’s payoffs in lab elections with monetary incentives. We examine two aspects of the electoral context: district magnitude and the distribution of preferences within the electorate. The main finding is that the frequency of correct voting is much higher in single-member than in multi-member district elections. As soon as there is more than one single seat to be allocated, voters have more difficulty figuring out whether they should vote sincerely for their preferred party or opt strategically for another party in order to maximize their payoffs. By contrast, the distribution of preferences within the electorate has no significant effect.
Although post-communist party systems have shown signs of stabilisation in recent years, they are still susceptible to the emergence of new parties. Sikk (2012) and Sikk and Hanley (2014) have suggested that many of these challengers owe their success to a distinct winning formula, appealing to the public primarily on the basis of their ‘newness’ and antiestablishment credentials. However, to draw conclusions about the relative importance of newness in explaining the successes of these parties, it is necessary to understand the nature of their support among the electorate. Few empirical demand-side analyses of party support in the region explicitly address the newness thesis. This paper analyses support for Poland’s Palikot Movement, a party which rose to prominence in 2011 and for whom newness constituted a significant aspect of its electoral appeal. It shows that while the Palikot Movement attracted voters who disliked the other parties, support for the party was more clearly attributable to its distinct ideological profile rather than its claim to represent those dissatisfied with the actions of the political establishment.
This article explores the political foundations of ethnic security fears and examines the relationship between the structure of party competition at the constituency level and security fears at the individual level in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. The analysis shows that security fears are higher in constituencies characterised by multiparty competition. The central implication of this finding is that rather than leading to ethnic moderation, multiparty competition in ethnic party systems tends to be more ethnically divisive than in two party systems, increasing collective fears of the future.
Notwithstanding the prolific research on the crisis of democracy since the 1980s, the attention that has been given to political parties has not been enough to fully understand the (increasing lack of) citizen support for them. Additionally, there is too little research on how the economic context can contribute to changes in support for political parties. Focusing on the Portuguese case, this article has three main goals: to assess citizen support for parties before and after the economic crisis; to explore the contribution of the crisis to changes in the explanatory models of support; and finally, to identify the consequences of support for parties, with regard to electoral turnout. Findings reveal the economic crisis has affected support for parties in Portugal, specifically regarding diffuse-institutional support and party legitimacy. Changes in public support for parties between 2008 and 2012 have had consequences on voter turnout.
In this article we assess the electoral effects of the nomination of ethnic minority candidates. We argue that descriptive representation is an important factor in how parties in SMD systems establish their coalitions over multiple elections. We demonstrate this by showing that descriptive representation has a consistent effect on voting behavior, and thus that parties can rely on descriptive representation to win over specific segments of the voting population. Previous studies have been limited to single election years and single countries, but we collect original data from multiple election cycles in Australia and the UK to test our argument. We find that descriptive representation is consistently associated with a 10-percentage point bump in support from ethnic minority independents and Labour supporters. We conclude by highlighting the importance of this finding for party competition.
Although strategic voting theory predicts that the number of parties will not exceed two in single-member district plurality systems, the observed number of parties often does. Previous research suggests that the reason why people vote for third parties is that they possess inaccurate information about the parties’ relative chances of winning. However, research has yet to determine whether third-party voting persists under conditions of accurate information. In this article, we examine whether possessing accurate information prevents individuals from voting for third-placed parties in the 2005 and 2010 British elections. We find that possessing accurate information does not prevent most individuals from voting for third-placed parties and that many voters possess reasonably accurate information regarding the viability of the parties in their constituencies. These findings suggest that arguments emphasizing levels of voter information as a major explanation for why multiparty systems often emerge in plurality systems are exaggerated.
In multi-level systems, state-wide parties are faced with particular challenges. Competing in elections on multiple levels of the polity, such parties juggle the desire for national recognizability and the need to be responsive to regional particularities. In this paper, I reflect on the delegation model of multi-level party politics, which is a theoretical perspective of great importance in the literature, arguing that the accuracy of the model depends on two critical assumptions. Based on these theoretical considerations, I develop the model further and apply it to the case of the two main Spanish state-wide parties, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and the Partido Popular (PP). More specifically, the programmatic positions of their regional branches are analyzed, and it is shown that the framework manifestos issued by the national party organizations shape these to a large extent. While this case is used to illustrate the illuminating potential of the extended delegation model, the paper is similarly attentive to the limitations of the model and also hints at the implications for our conception of democracy in multi-level systems.
Political parties are often thought of as unitary actors that have consistent preferences. This ‘hidden assumption’ means that heterogeneity within parties, and therefore intra-party dynamics, are overlooked in explaining attitudes. When it comes to devolution and federalisation, parties or MPs belonging to the same region are also often implicitly considered to have homogeneous viewpoints and attitudes. Relying on an original survey of MPs carried out during the Belgian political gridlock of 2010–2011, this article uncovers some of the key dimensions of the intra-party dynamics through analysis of MPs’ preferences towards institutional reform in Belgium. Far from being explained along party or community lines, our results demonstrate how MPs’ political and sociological background, national/regional identity, political career, and inter-community relations strongly shape their preferences.
This paper discusses a new group of parties that we term anti-establishment reform parties (AERPs), which combine moderate social and economic policies with anti-establishment appeals and a desire to change the way politics is conducted. We analyse the electoral breakthroughs of AERPs in central and eastern Europe (CEE), the region where AERPs have so far been most successful. Examples include the Simeon II National Movement, Movement for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) (Bulgaria), Res Publica (Estonia), New Era (Latvia), TOP09 and Public Affairs (Czech Republic) and Positive Slovenia. We examine the conditions under which such parties broke through in nine CEE states in 1997–2012 using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). We find five sufficient causal paths combining high or rising corruption, rising unemployment and party system instability. Rising corruption plays a key role in most pathways but, unexpectedly, AERP breakthroughs are more closely associated with economic good times than bad.
Research on party membership development commonly reports figures aggregated to the country level and/or using only a few time-points. While these choices may be appropriate for certain research questions, they nevertheless hide major differences between parties and conceal short-term fluctuations. Additionally, they are inappropriate for studying individual party trajectories. This is necessary, however, to better describe and ultimately explain the phenomenon of membership decline. The article analyses in total 1653 observations across 47 parties in six western European countries between 1960 and 2010 to test hypotheses pertaining to individual party membership development. Using multilevel modelling and time-series analyses, the results show what aggregated data with few time-points cannot: membership decline is by far not a universal phenomenon. Additionally, membership decline appears to be part of a party’s life-cycle. The more consolidated parties are, the fewer members they have. Few differences between party families are observable.
Legislative defection in political systems characterized by party dominance and cartelization is usually seen as damaging the members of parliament’s (MPs’) careers. Switching legislators does not portray an image of confidence and reliability and the MPs’ re-election is unlikely. Drawing on a dataset that includes all defector MPs in post-communist Romania until 2008, this article indicates that one in five defectors gets re-elected. The quest for explanations focuses on individual and party features. Results indicate that re-election of defectors is a function of the strategic behavior (the choice of the destination party) and the legislative experience of the defector. All these items count against party and legislative activity.
We know that most House seats remain within the same party over the course of a redistricting decade. For example, over 75% did so in the last decade. This gives rise to the question: "Why do some seats change hands and others not?" We seek to go beneath the standard answers (such as extent of electoral vulnerability as indicated by the previous victory margin, challenger qualifications, relative spending of challenger and incumbent, midterm loss affecting districts newly won by the president’s party, realignment effects that made Democrats in the South vulnerable) to examine the conditions of ideological competition that affect each of these factors and the concomitant probability of electoral defeat. We offer a general model of unidimensional party competition across multiple constituencies, where a party "chases the outliers" of the other party that are closest to its own ideological mean, thus eliminating "anomalous" districts which should be vulnerable to change in party control, and we test that model with data from the U.S. House of Representatives 1980–2006. Over time, Democrats capture liberal and moderately liberal districts held by Republicans, while Republicans capture conservative and moderately conservative districts held by Democrats. In a neo-Downsian world where candidates do not locate at the preferences of the median voter in the district but, rather, are shifted in the direction of their own party mean, we show that this outlier-chasing dynamic can be expected, in the long run, to "empty" out the center. This results in an equilibrium of ideologically distinct parties and a high level of polarization, involving a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the seats that become vulnerable change as the parties become more distinct. Indeed, rather than puzzling about why so much polarization exists, our work suggests that the real puzzle is why it has taken so long to get to the level of polarization we presently enjoy. We suggest that the combination of incumbency advantage, and multidimensionality of political competition might be the answer, with the Civil War role of race as an independent dimension slowly wearing off.
This article examines the case study of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from December 2006 to October 2013. During this period the party fought three federal elections. In 2007 they won government after 11 years in opposition. In 2010 they were required to form a minority government to stay in power and in 2013 they were comprehensively defeated. Beneath the surface though, party leaders were able to exercise agency to stretch their influence beyond their prescribed authority and to contribute directly to unexpected structural reform in the party. Altering the way the party leader was selected had up to this point been resisted by Australia’s major parties. This article will explore the context in which this period of stretch and reform occurred and will compare the ALP case to the pre-existing literature on institutional stretch and expansion of the leadership selectorate.
In the US House, the Suspension of the Rules procedure provides a route by which vote buying may occur. To investigate the conditions under which partisan theories anticipate that this behavior is more likely to happen, I use a dataset of all bills on which a final passage vote was taken in the House between 1975 and 2010. The House is more likely to consider bills by suspension to provide side payments to three types of bill sponsors from the majority party: ideologically distant members of this group; members whose preferences are located within the first 30% of the space in the majority party blockout zone; and members whose preferences are located on the minority party side of the chamber median.
Reports of party membership have documented steep declines in formal enrollment in many countries, but numbers alone tell us little about the systemic causes or likely implications of such drops. Existing cross-national surveys can help illuminate the extent and consequences of these changes. Unfortunately, they are difficult to use for this purpose because differences in question wording and institutional differences in the meaning of party membership produce unstable results. This paper proposes to overcome these obstacles by using behavioral measures of party membership in survey-based studies of party membership. We demonstrate that such measures produce results which are more consistent across surveys and therefore more meaningful. We then illustrate their utility by using a behaviorally-qualified measure to study how party membership decline has affected parties’ ability to mobilize grassroots partisan participation. Our analysis also shows that even though reported party membership declined from the 1990s to the 2000s, there was surprisingly little change in this decade in the number of politically active partisans.
Intraparty democracy is considered an important feature of former rebel movements’ adaptation to democracy more generally. What conditions intraparty democracy in former rebel parties? This article traces internal debates about and organizational adaptation to intraparty democracy in Partai Aceh (Indonesia) and Fretilin (East Timor), paying specific attention to the interaction between party leaderships and the wider rebel organization. Leaning on theories of party change and organization, the article finds that even in the presence of formal procedures that prescribe inclusive decision-making, the nature and persistence of decentralized wartime command structures and relative strength and dependence on these networks limits intraparty democracy.
Theories that explain variations in party systems typically emphasize the role of political institutions and social cleavages. Using a panel dataset of election returns from 15 Indian states from 1967 to 2004. this article establishes considerable variation in the effective number of parties across states and over time, despite the same political institutions and relatively stable social cleavages. We argue that a hitherto ignored dimension, the level of party organization, has a significant impact on the nature of the party system. The level of party organization incentivizes politicians differently in terms of their decision to stay, join another party or float a new party, when their ambitions are thwarted within a party. To test this theory, a unique indicator of party organization is developed on the basis of extensive qualitative research. We find that in Indian states where parties are more organized, both the effective number of parties and electoral volatility are lower.
In this article, we test the effects of interest group endorsements on potential voters in the 2008 presidential election. Specifically, we use a posttest-only, multiple control group experiment (N = 701) to examine how real-world endorsements affect citizens. We find that endorsements have profound effects on some voters. Specifically, we find that interest-group endorsements profoundly affect the candidate evaluations and stated voting preferences of potential voters who are what we call ‘poorly aligned’ – that is, whose stand on the issue on which the endorsement is based (in this case, abortion) does not align ‘properly’ with their party identification and ideology. Moreover, we find that the effects of endorsements are most profound among poorly aligned voters who are not well informed. In all, our results confirm that interest-group endorsements indeed act as cues for voters, even in high-information elections.
The rise of Islamist movements in the Muslim world has been the subject of heated debate among scholars and policymakers. One group of scholars argues that Islamists use elections as a façade and warn against their political ascendency via electoral democracy. Another group of scholars, however, points to the moderating effects democracy has on views held by Islamists. This article does not present a novel theory but rather attempts to improve on existing studies by providing a test for the inclusion-moderation hypothesis using the data on Turkey collected by the World Values Survey. The findings from the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis, as well as in-depth face-to-face interviews with ranking members of the Islamist parties and communities in Turkey, show that Islamists develop positive attitudes toward electoral democracy to the extent that they are allowed to share power. Islamists’ support for democracy, however, seems to be fragmented, provisional and driven by pragmatism more than a principled commitment to democratic norms and values.
This study develops and tests theoretical formulas for linking country size and party system characteristics. For countries using one-seat electoral districts or nationwide districts, the averages of the largest seat-share, effective number of assembly parties and mean duration of cabinets can be predicted based solely on population. For countries allocating seats by PR in multi-seat districts, the averages of these characteristics can be predicted based on population and district magnitude. We show that first-past-the-post countries of less than one million tend to have highly dominant largest parties and one-and-a-half party assemblies, rather than a balance of two parties. For larger countries, and PR countries of any size, population is not destiny, as far as party system is concerned.
In this article, we analyse the impact of intra-party procedures of candidate selection for national elections on the representativeness of parties towards their voters. With regard to candidate selection we distinguish between two dimensions: inclusion and centralization. While the first identifies the type of selectorate for candidate nominations (members, delegates or committees), the second captures the territorial unit in which the nomination is decided (local, regional or national). Based on data for 53 parties in 9 Western European countries for the period 1970 to 1990, the analysis points to the relevance of the inclusion dimension. Parties in which party elites decide the nomination of candidates show slightly higher degrees of representation than parties with more inclusive selectorates. We conduct our analysis separately for two frequently used but theoretically different concepts of representation: cross-sectional representation (at one point in time) and dynamic representation (over time). Our analysis shows that candidate-selection procedures only matter for the first concept. The empirically inconsistent results between the two concepts are due to deficiencies in the way dynamic representation is currently operationalized.
This article argues that niche party formation is only one of several substitutable strategies for niche activists seeking policy influence. Other organizational mechanisms are argued to be superior to political parties under certain institutional conditions. I introduce a formal model of how activists achieve policy influence by choosing to support the formation of whichever type of organization will optimally send a signal of electoral threat to mainstream politicians. Institutions determine the different access costs for the various organizational mechanisms that can be used to send this signal, and also determine the associated response costs to mainstream politicians of making concessions to different organizational mechanisms. Therefore under particular institutional circumstances that affect these two cost parameters, interest group entry may surpass party entry as the optimal strategy for activists. The predictions of the model are assessed via a nested logit model using cross-national survey data on how activists have allocated their individual support to different organizational mechanisms.
In this article, we examine the programmatic reactions to the rise of populist parties. It has been argued that populism is not necessarily the prerogative of populist parties; it has been adopted by mainstream parties as well. The article investigates whether populism is contagious. On the basis of the results of a content analysis of election manifestos of parties in five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), we conclude that the programmes of mainstream parties have not become more populist in recent years. We find no evidence that mainstream parties change their programmes when confronted with electoral losses or successful populist challengers. Yet, we do find that populist parties change their own programmes when they have been successful: Their initial success makes them tone down their populism.
Parties tend to be wary of candidate-centred electoral systems, which is one factor why the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is limited to a few cases. One source of this wariness is that STV is thought to favour non-party candidates, or independents, a claim based primarily on the experience of Ireland. The relative absence of independents in Australia and Malta, the other two countries using STV for national elections, challenges the merits of this reasoning. This study re-examines the nature of this causal link using constituency-level data from the Irish and Australian cases. The results indicate that there is not a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis that STV favours independents, in particular because electoral system detail can affect a system’s ability to realize expected consequences. While constituency size, ballot access and ballot design affect support for independents, it is not always in the expected manner. This suggests that the non-party phenomenon is more than just a by-product of electoral system effects.
Intra-party candidate selection processes are one of the prime mechanisms through which parties organize. This article seeks to examine empirically what factors account for variation in candidate selection processes. After identifying the key assertions developed in the literature, I use a unique cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 512 parties in 46 countries to examine whether a party’s ideology, size, regime type, territorial organization and region affect the way parties select their legislative candidates. I pay special attention to the hypothesized relationships between electoral systems and selection processes, since the literature was indecisive and since research on the effects of institutions on legislators’ behaviour often amalgamated elections and selections. Underlying this amalgamation is an assumption that electoral systems determine candidate selection processes. I use my data to shed light on these relationships and provide a cautionary tale about amalgamating elections and selections.
Studies of government participation in established democracies demonstrate that ideological factors significantly influence whether or not a party gets into government. Thus far, research on government participation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) indicates that ideological considerations have been insignificant. This is unexpected given what we know from the literature on parties and party systems in the region. Party systems have become more stable and parties themselves rapidly developed identifiable policy platforms. I argue that one of the reasons for this disparity between the government participation literature in new and established democracies is the failure to understand the ideological space across the CEE region. Although party competition can be conceptualized as a one-dimensional space in each country, the policies that underpin notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ vary. Imposing a definition of the ideological space that was developed for West European countries ignores the ideological context of CEE. This article finds that when the left–right space is defined in a way that is meaningful to CEE countries, ideological factors are highly significant indicators of government membership across the region. Specifically, ideological proximity to the formateur and proximity to the median significantly increase a party’s probability of participating in government.
In this article we use concentration of electoral support for individual candidates and divergence between party and electorate preferences for candidates to test hypotheses about the party–electorate relationship. We test these using data from preferential voting in Slovak general elections between 1998 and 2010. Our results suggest that low concentration is associated with parties based on ideology and high concentration with parties based on leadership. Age of the party fails to predict the concentration or the divergence. For coalitions, type of coalition matters in regard to divergence. Furthermore, we document that divergence increases with the size of the electoral support, though this seems to be true only for larger parties.
This article examines the ‘demand’ side of the market for political activism and analyses the extent to which grassroots activists of political parties and politically oriented civil society organizations (CSOs) resemble or differ. With data from several surveys of CSO and Green party activists in Spain we evaluate how much the pool of members from all these organizations are part of what can be identified as a single market of activists. After describing the socio-economic, political socialization and recruitment backgrounds, as well as the internal and external engagement of activists, we conclude that – while sharing some common features – activists of CSOs and Green parties are less alike than frequently assumed and that the analogy of a single market of political activism may be more misleading than helpful in our understanding of the challenges that parties face to counteract declining membership trends.
There is abundant research on how social cleavages shape political preferences in developed countries with uninterrupted democracies, but we know less about this topic for middle income countries with recently restored democracies. In this analysis of the Chilean case, we examine with Latinobarometer survey data from 1995 to 2009 the evolution of social cleavages as shapers of political preferences (measured with a left–right self-placement scale). We find a general process of dealignment across time, indicated by the decreasing association between political preferences on the one hand, and class, religion and regime preferences on the other. We tentatively link dealignment at the mass level to the strategies pursued by political parties operating in a political and economic context that encourages ideological moderation and convergence to the centre. These strategies weaken the differentiated signals needed for sustaining an aligned citizenry.
One of the most relevant aspects of party democratization is the consequence of more inclusive methods of candidate selection, and particularly of primaries, on party competition. Despite its relevance, and contrary to the attention it has received in the US, the electoral consequences of primaries have rarely been analysed in Europe. This article assesses whether the use of one member one vote (OMOV) primaries for candidate selection affects the electoral result of the party and, if it does, in what direction. The article contributes to our still limited knowledge of this aspect of European party politics with an analysis of the use of closed party primaries by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and their effects on its electoral performance in local elections. With an analysis of the electoral performance of the PSOE in municipalities of 10,000 inhabitants or more for the 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011 local elections, the article shows that OMOV primaries have, overall, positive electoral payoffs but also that their effects can vary.
Research on legislative behaviour in the European Parliament is heavily reliant on recorded votes. Previous theoretical work has uncovered competing selection mechanisms that might cause a vote to be recorded. It has been argued that European Political Groups call the roll because the voting mode affects MEPs’ voting decisions. However, the underlying causal mechanism, as well as the size and direction of this effect, remains a matter of dispute. Drawing on a unique dataset, the article puts these arguments to an empirical test, the results suggesting that European Political Groups are more likely to call the roll if they stand to benefit from an overall lower level of voting cohesion. Moreover, I find that roll-call votes are frequently motivated by position-taking rather than by policy-seeking motives. These findings have significant, but ambivalent, implications for the analysis of recorded votes in the European Parliament.
The literature on regionalist parties has traditionally focused on the origins of their electoral strength while their ideology remains an under-explored aspect of territorial party politics. This is surprising because for the question of whether decentralization ‘accommodates’ or ‘empowers’ regionalist pressure one needs to consider both. In this paper we single out the factors that increase the probability of adopting a radical (secessionist) as opposed to a moderate (autonomist) ideological stance, with a particular focus on the effect of decentralization. We make use of a large and original dataset, covering 11 countries, 49 regions, and 78 parties for the 1940s–2000s. Beyond the level of decentralization and decentralization reforms, we analyze the impact of two sets of factors: the first concerns regional identity and includes regional language, regional history and geographical remoteness; while the second concerns institutional/political variables which include voting systems, competition from statewide parties and from other regionalist parties, and office responsibility. We find that all variables matter for regionalist party ideology but with different effects across regional and national electoral arenas. We also find that level of decentralization and regional reform is significantly associated with radicalism, which suggests that policy success and accommodative strategies by statewide parties may lead to a polarization on the centre-periphery dimension.
The RILE index of the manifesto dataset is a popular but controversial estimate of parties’ left–right positions. It has been thoroughly criticized, yet a basic question of its validity has not been addressed. In the current article I argue that for the index to be valid, patterns of association presumed by the logic of the index must be present in the data used to calculate it. I apply canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to test these associations within and between the sets of variables that form the left–right (RILE) index, concluding that for countries which have not experienced a communist past the relationship is present, although substantively weak. More important, however, is that for post-communist countries the required associations in the data are clearly not there. The RILE index is therefore an invalid measure of left–right position for this set of countries.
Political campaigns are much more attack-filled in some countries than in others. What accounts for it? One answer hinges on the country’s party system. We propose that two-party systems encourage more negativity than multiparty systems because parties in a multiparty system (1) must maintain good relationships with parties with which they may want to enter into coalition and (2) run the risk of supporters of the attacked party moving to support a third party. We test the relationship between party system and attack behaviour in New Zealand, which in 1996 changed from a single-member district, first-past-the-post system to a mixed-member proportional system. The result was a more fragmented party system, resulting in coalition and minority governments. Analysing over 250 ads and party election broadcasts aired from 1969 to 2011, we find that advertising has become more positive since 1996, suggesting that party systems affect the tone of election campaigns.
It is often taken for granted that parties support electoral reform because they anticipate seat payoffs from the psychological and mechanical effects of the new electoral system. Although some studies point out that elements related to values and the willingness to achieve social goals are also relevant to explaining party preference in those situations, a general model of how these considerations influence support for electoral reform is still missing. To fill this gap, I develop in this article a policy-seeking model accounting for values-related factors and operationalize it using one of the most firmly established effects of electoral systems in the literature: The degree of inclusiveness and its consequences for the representation of social groups in parliament. The empirical relevance of this model is then tested using an original dataset reporting the actual position of 115 parties facing 22 electoral reform proposals in OECD countries since 1961. The results show that willingness to favour the electoral system most in line with a party’s electoral platform has a unique explanatory power over party support for a more proportional electoral system. In turn, values appear to be as crucial as party self-interest in explaining the overall electoral reform story.
Economic voting claims that citizens will reward or punish the incumbent government based on the state of the economy as a mechanism of democratic accountability. In negative economic voting, in order to vote against the government, citizens must have options (parties) in which to place their vote to voice discontent. If not, there is no opportunity to cast an ‘economic vote’ and abstention results, leading to a weakened economic effect. In this article I argue that the electoral system indirectly mediates the relationship between the economy and the vote by determining the number of viable parties which act as the conduit for punishing the incumbent. Cross-national data and individual-level data for the case of Spain are used to test the impact of the number of parties on economic voting. The findings suggest that when there are more viable parties competing, the probability of casting an economic vote increases.
A marginal racist organization, Golden Dawn, managed to attract first the votes of almost one out of 14 Greek voters and then global media and public attention. How did an extreme right groupuscule invade the political terrain of an EU-10 member state? Existing attempts to account for this phenomenon point to demand-side explanations, related to the political turmoil that followed the notorious debt crisis and the accompanying austerity measures. These explanations, however, fail to account for the genesis of this trajectory. We delve into this exact question, focusing on the election that marked the emergence of the Golden Dawn and permitted further electoral penetration. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that the party took advantage of favourable political circumstances developing a grassroots network of protection that helped it enter the central political arena.
Most analyses of policy outcomes from coalition-bargaining have hitherto been conducted within a spatial framework that requires the aggregation of coalition policy into a small number of point estimates. Such an approach, however, is limited in terms of the level of specificity at which it can operate. This article therefore draws on the methodology from the pledge fulfilment literature in order to provide a more in-depth examination of coalition-bargaining outcomes. We are thus able to take advantage of the fact that contemporary coalition agreements provide a wealth of detailed information on the government’s prospective course of policy action. Based on a quantitative text analysis of election manifestos, a dataset of over 1,000 election pledges is used to test a number of hypotheses on the adoption of policies in Austrian coalition agreements between 2002 and 2008. The multivariate models yield strong support for the hypotheses and suggest that the methodological approach has the potential to enhance our understanding of coalition-bargaining.
In this article, we test rival theories of party competition. Previous research predicting party policy positions is limited to a small (and arguably biased) sample of countries. Using new data from the 2008 Austrian National Election Study, we test the proximity and directional model of voting, Grofman’s discounting model and Kedar’s compensational model of voting. We find that Grofman’s discounting model performs best predicting party policy positions. Yet, not all party policy positions are predicted equally well. The most obvious misrepresentation is that the rightist FPÖ is placed close to the centre of the policy space. This centripetal bias, which has also been found in earlier work, may result from simplifying assumptions of the algorithm used to derive Nash equilibria of party policy positions that need to be challenged. Our findings emphasize the necessity to test models of party competition using new data and to motivate further research explaining party position-taking.
First of all, this paper explores the rationale for internal party democracy, highlighting the ‘school for democracy’ argument. Second, it identifies three crucial processes as determinants for the level of intra-party democracy; a democratic process for the election of leaders, for the formulation of policies and for coalition making. The first is emphasized. Third, the quality of intra-party democracy in Bangladesh is analysed in terms of party leadership selection and the prevalent practice of dynastic rule. The overall finding is that the degree of internal democracy of political parties in Bangladesh is weak, due to the electoral parties’ weak organizations, strong centralization and prevalent informal decision-making processes controlled by a limited number of party elites (dynastic parties). This general result has important implications regarding the prospects of democratizing party politics and consolidating democracy in Bangladesh.
There is no single, correct answer to the question ‘what type of party is new party X?’ nor is there a foolproof way of gauging new-party X's prospects of survival as a parliamentary actor. The recent literature on new parties predicts a relatively low survival rate for ‘entrepreneur parties’, defined as parties formed without a measure of support from an external ‘promoter’ organisation. Charisma alone, the argument goes, is unlikely to be sufficient for party ‘sustainability’. This article, however, identifies a sustainable type of new party in which the founding entrepreneur, acting without specific external group support, combines charismatic leadership and organisational leadership to create a stable mass membership party. The article's empirical section focuses on the evolution of one such ‘charisma plus’ or ‘resilient entrepreneurial party’ — the True Finns — and, based on personal interviews with its long-serving leader, it does so from the express standpoint of the party entrepreneur.
Political parties are essential linkage mechanisms between citizens and the political system. We know less, however, about the question how this mechanism operates. While some authors assume it is sufficient that parties offer citizens ideological options about the way society should be governed, others indicate that parties provide strong ties to the political system by offering stable identities like party membership. In this analysis of the European Social Survey cumulative file (five waves, 2002–2010), we investigate the relation between party membership, closeness to a political party and trust in political institutions. While party membership is declining, its relation with political trust is limited. We do not find any indication that the decline of party membership could have a substantial effect on levels of political trust. Feeling close to a political party is more strongly related to political trust, even controlling for political interest. Results indicate that in most European societies levels of party closeness are stable. We conclude that political parties function as a linkage mechanism between citizens and the state, but that there is no reason to attribute a privileged role to formal party membership, as feeling close to a political party has a stronger linkage effect.
Representative democracy is party democracy. Parties vote together in the legislative arena; party labels act as information shortcuts in the electoral arena, tying together co-partisan legislators’ re-election prospects. But the utility of party labels is weakened by waning party identifications in the electorate. Partisan dealignment therefore risks undercutting party loyalty on the part of backbenchers. Combining district-level data on electoral volatility and new data from the PARTIREP survey of legislators in 15 advanced industrial democracies, it is demonstrated that party loyalty is lowest where partisan dealignment is strongest – even after accounting for backbenchers’ policy preferences, whether they represent the ruling party or the opposition, and their campaign strategies. Our results have important implications for the sustainability of current models of representative democracy.
Political parties are central to modern democracy and the selection of their leaders is one of the most crucial decisions for any political party to make. Yet, the analysis of party leadership survival is still in its infancy. The pioneering research has been confined to few countries and decades and has focused exclusively on performance-related explanations. While performance is an obvious determinant of party leader survival, generations of research on party organizations suggest that intra-party factors should matter, too. We argue that, while the political performance of a party leader (winning elections, securing government participation) is important, intra-party support and the rules of leadership selection add substantively to our understanding of why party leaders survive or fall. We test these expectations on a new dataset covering all leaders of Austrian parties between 1945 and 2011. The results of our statistical analysis support our claim and show that intra-party factors have a considerable impact on party leader survival.
We undertake an examination of southern state legislators who changed their party affiliation between 1992 and 2012. Not surprisingly, the vast majority went from being Democrats to Republicans, and this change has fuelled the dynamics at the national level by pulling the Republican Party further to the right and Democrats to the left. Hence, these are the incumbent party switchers we evaluate. With the use of constituency, electoral and contextual data on both switchers and non-switchers, we assess which factors influence the likelihood that a Democratic office-holder will switch to the GOP (Grand Old Party). We find that the typical demographic correlates of southern Republicanism, such as race and education, do indeed have a significant effect on the probability of the GOP label being adopted. In addition, the disruptive effect of redistricting induces switches, as does a change in the party of the elected governor. However, electoral pressure does not have an independent effect on party switching. Our results suggest that party switching is a response to several district-level factors as well as the broader political context within the state. We conclude with a discussion of why increasing partisan polarization and the maturation of the southern GOP is likely to forestall future party switching.
Whereas the belief that political parties are necessary elements of democracy is widespread in political science, it is in fact empirically false. Six small Pacific island democracies function without parties, and several explanations for the absence of parties in these countries have been developed. In the present article, an interview-based qualitative analysis of one of these six democracies without parties – the Republic of Palau – is offered in order to examine why parties are absent here, and how the Palauan democracy functions without parties. The findings of this case study indicate that both size and culture contribute to the non-existence of parties in Palau, and that the role of parties is in many ways fulfilled by clan structures. In several respects the absence of parties is found to undermine the functioning of Palauan democracy, whereas respondents paradoxically indicate that non-elected traditional leadership contributes positively to the performance of democracy in Palau.
Quantitative studies aiming at general explanations for the emergence of new political parties stress the importance of new issues and the programmatic behaviour of other parties. I connect these two aspects by arguing that the programmatic diversity of existing parties is a strong influence on the incentives for new party formation, as it determines the scope for possible programmatic innovations. I use two measures for programmatic diversity in order to capture the programmatic supply by existing parties. It can be shown that the explanatory contribution of programmatic factors is as high as or even higher than that of the factors usually cited in the literature on new political parties, e.g. electoral institutions. Moreover, the results underline the necessity of differentiating between genuinely new parties and splits from existing parties as subtypes of new political parties.
The main objective of this article is to provide a comparative analysis of the impact of the components that determine positions on the left–right scale using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) which, in addition and in contrast to previous studies, includes the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Our findings show the stronger effect of the partisan component vis-à-vis other factors, resulting in further proof of the main role that parties play in influencing voters’ positions on the left–right scale, as long as they constitute the main and most visible actors around which electoral competition develops. Moreover, there are significant variations among countries regarding the impact of the partisan component, principally stemming from the degree of ideological polarization in party systems.
Whether the opposition in a democratic country is unified or fragmented is an important characteristic that may influence the accountability of government, as a recent study demonstrates that the degree of opposition fragmentation has consequences for the electoral performance of ruling parties. This study explores the determinants of opposition fragmentation using data from 18 advanced democracies. I argue and provide evidence that deliberative parliamentary rules that allow opposition parties to have greater influence in the policymaking process lead to higher levels of opposition fragmentation. Opposition parties deprived of political influence tend to reduce their levels of fragmentation in order to become more competitive. This finding suggests that there may be a trade-off between deliberativeness and competitiveness in democratic politics.
Our current knowledge of the causes of party unity rests heavily on the analysis of average unity scores of party groups from different countries. This study design invites two related problems: By aggregating unity scores we miss valuable variance at the level of disaggregated votes, and by comparing these aggregate scores across time and countries we might confound institutional effects with an unobserved case-specific selection bias of roll-call votes. In taking advantage of the laboratory-like conditions of the 16 sub-national parliaments of Germany and shifting the level of analysis to party unity in every single vote this article addresses both problems. Analysing 8607 unity scores, it is shown that the voting context is an important moderator of institutional effects on party unity. Specifically, it is shown that government status boosts party unity particularly within legislative important votes. Furthermore, the unity-boosting effect of slim majorities is only present for government parties and particularly strong when legislative consequential decisions are taken. Beyond that I also show that roll-call vote request, increasing ideological distances and norms of party loyalty increase party unity.
This article argues that digital media are introducing a new grassroots-based mode of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ (CIC) that challenges the dominant professionalized model of campaign management by devolving power over core tasks to the grassroots. After defining the practice through reference to the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and online parties literature, we devise a measure of CIC that is applied to UK parties in the 2010 election. Our findings show that CIC is emerging outside the U.S. and adoption is associated with major party status, although it may be of particular appeal to political actors facing a resource deficit. The conclusions focus on the implications of CIC for new forms of party membership, indirect voter mobilization and the contextual factors influencing this new model of campaigning.
The concept of the niche party has become increasingly popular in analyses of party competition. Yet, existing approaches vary in their definitions and their measurement approaches. We propose using a minimal definition that allows us to compare political parties in terms of their ‘nicheness’. We argue that the conceptual core of the niche party concept is based on issue emphasis and that a niche party emphasizes policy areas neglected by its rivals. Based on this definition, we propose a continuous measure that allows for more fine-grained measurement of a party’s ‘nicheness’ than the dominant, dichotomous approaches and thereby limits the risk of measurement error. Drawing on data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project, we show that (1) our measure has high face validity and (2) exposes differences among parties that are not captured by alternative, static or dichotomous measures.
The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.
Using Sweden as an example, we propose the hypothesis that local candidate lists rest on a different rationale compared to national party lists, more specifically a rationality that has developed as a result of an altered relationship between the local and national levels and is expressed in terms of localism. The emergence of new local lists is most likely an effect of the challenges to the welfare state posed in the past 40 years. However, although local lists are essentially a recent phenomenon, our examples suggest that their existence can also be explained in terms of historical patterns of dissent from and resistance to state intervention at the local level.
In this study, I propose a more differentiated conceptualization of party novelty that shifts from the age of party, and viewing newness in terms of organizational youthfulness (how close to birth, how far removed from death), to something more complex, i.e. the ‘newness’ of party leaders, programmes, names, etc. Thus, this concept supplements the understanding of novelty in strictly organizational terms proposing to consider also other elements. I call it a ‘thick’ conceptualization of party novelty. I argue that, in a given electoral cycle, any party is new to some degree. I propose to measure party novelty considering changes of party attributes and changes of party structural affiliation. I present the Party Novelty Database, which records changes in national parties participating in the EU parliamentary elections from 1989 to 2009. I show that party novelty exists and varies. In more than 80 percent of cases, parties changed themselves in various ways and to varying degree, with Italy and France showing the highest levels of novelty and Finland and Sweden the lowest over the period considered. In conclusion, I suggest the ways in which the concept and the measure of party novelty can be used to explain political phenomena.
While the rise of right-wing populism in West European politics has received considerable attention in academic circles, the equivalent phenomenon in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) remains understudied. I address this gap by examining the factors contributing to right-wing populist party success in CEE. I argue that the success of such parties is best explained by the presence of salient ethnic minority parties. I propose that successful ethnic minority parties heighten the salience of ethno-nationalist divisions within a state, creating electoral demand for parties of the populist right. Political elites capitalize on the fear generated by the presence of strong minority parties and channel it into electoral support for the populist right. Performing statistical analysis on an original dataset of 108 CEE elections, I find evidence that the electoral performance of right-wing populist parties is influenced by the performance of ethnic minority parties and their participation in government.
Research on comparative voter turnout has produced a puzzling set of findings: proportional representation (PR) electoral systems increase turnout, but multiparty systems decrease turnout. This paper provides new evidence to resolve these conflicting findings by developing and testing the hypothesis that the presence of a pre-electoral coalition (PEC) increases voter turnout by reducing uncertainty about the possible government that will form after the election. PECs provide credible signals to voters about the commitment of participating parties to govern together, making the election more decisive as a mechanism for selecting the government by clarifying the possible electoral outcomes. This increased electoral decisiveness increases voters' incentives to turn out. This hypothesis is tested on a data set of 223 national legislative elections in 19 parliamentary democracies between 1970 and 2002, with the results indicating that the presence of a PEC increases turnout on average by more than 1.5 percentage points. This finding provides support for the argument that the electoral context and strategic party behavior have important effects on voter participation.
In a recent article in Party Politics, Detlef Jahn proposed an alternative way of generating left–right scores using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). Despite presenting innovative ideas, the article requires comment and correction. First, Jahn’s claim of a deductive approach is not convincing. He proceeds at least partly inductively. Furthermore, he ignores the theoretical ground of the competing approaches. Second, and more importantly, the central criterion by which to evaluate different approaches should be construct validity; however, Jahn does not conduct a full test of the construct validity. In this comment, I first explain the theoretical base of different approaches in generating left–right position scores using CMP. Second, I conduct a test of construct validity using not only expert data but also survey data. The results clearly suggest that approaches using a context-specific scheme for determining left–right issues are superior to the existing alternatives. This comment should be of interest to all scholars concerned with the question of how to create valid party position indicators.
In this article we provide a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the evolution of partisan alignments in Latin America since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization. We first point to a series of limitations of the conventional framework of partisan alignments, namely their disregard of party systems that are only partially or non-institutionalized. Second, we propose a refined framework that is more universally applicable. We then operationalize our indicators and apply our new framework to every democratic country in Latin America to generate a map of the evolution of partisan loyalties in Latin America in the period 1980–2012. Our analysis reveals that the conventional view of widespread partisan dealignment in Latin America is largely inaccurate.
A source of the strength of Green parties has been their willingness to realign their distinctive organizational characteristics to suit the external environment, with the effect of pushing such organizations closer to a more conventional party type. Major organizational adaptations by Green parties have been much studied but only scant attention has been paid to the cumulative effects that ‘minor’ change renders to such parties. This article examines the impact of minor organizational change through an analysis of one of the oldest statewide Green parties in Australia. It finds that minor organizational changes exert a subtle but equally powerful force in moving such parties away from their amateur status to a more professional party type, even in the absence of reform to historical party structures.
Scholars have long been examining the presidential nomination process in the United States. In addition to studies considering the selection mechanism itself, there has been a movement towards analysing the contest even before voting begins. Campaign finance allows for a reliable and valid means to examine the year prior to the nomination with data that are not just vast in quantity but also consistent across time. Donors who gave to multiple campaigns represent a particularly important subset of elite participants in elections whose behaviour shed light on phenomena of parties functioning as a network. We find only rare instances of multiple donors giving across party and that Democratic contributors function as a far more cohesive unit. Also, without any supervising entity, the candidate that amasses the most shared donors goes on to win the nomination in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.
Measurement of the electoral mobilization of ethnic parties has posed a considerable challenge to those performing comparative research on the political mobilization of ethnic groups. To address this issue, we propose indicators that estimate the electoral mobilization of ethnic parties by combining administrative and survey data. Specifically, we propose two measures: an absolute one, fully isolable from context, and a relative one, which corrects for turnouts. Furthermore, we show that a particular indicator based entirely on more widely available administrative data is valid when a narrow definition of ethnic parties is applied. Our indicators for the electoral mobilization of ethnic parties allow for valid comparisons across ethnic parties in different countries and regions at different points in time. We expect these new indicators to trigger further comparative studies on ethnic parties.
The study of Conservative women is expanding to compensate for the historic over-emphasis of gender and politics research on left-wing women. We add to this burgeoning literature and assess the extent to which the modern gender gap in political attitudes – where women have moved to the left of men – is evident among supporters of the British Conservative Party. We find that, like women party members, women Conservative supporters are noticeably to the left of men, but only on economic issues. This sex gap cannot simply be accounted for by women’s employment in the public sphere, lesser interest in politics or because they are more morally conservative than male Conservatives. These findings are likely to have serious implications for intra-party discipline, the support for the Conservative Party at the next British general election and, if replicated elsewhere, speak to what it means to ‘represent’ the interests of right-wing women.
Despite a growing interest in investigating the causes of political corruption, far less attention has been devoted to analysing the conditions under which political actors have an incentive to highlight corruption in electoral competition. Do parties talk about corruption just as a reaction to exogenous factors (i.e. scandals reported in the press)? Or are there systematic patterns in the way parties emphasize this issue during campaigns? Assuming that corruption is a valence issue (i.e. an issue universally supported/disclaimed by electors), we put our investigation in the framework of a one-dimensional model and hypothesize that spatial considerations can affect parties’ incentives to emphasize corruption issues. Empirical analysis based on CMP data shows that such an incentive exists for both cabinet and non-cabinet parties, and increases with proximity on the ideological scale.
This article expands our current knowledge about ministerial selection in coalition governments and analyses why ministerial candidates succeed in acquiring a cabinet position after general elections. It argues that political parties bargain over potential office-holders during government-formation processes, selecting future cabinet ministers from an emerging ‘bargaining pool’. The article draws upon a new dataset comprising all ministrable candidates discussed by political parties during eight government-formation processes in Germany between 1983 and 2009. The conditional logit regression analysis reveals that temporal dynamics, such as the day she enters the pool, has a significant effect on her success in achieving a cabinet position. Other determinants of ministerial selection discussed in the existing literature, such as party and parliamentary expertise, are less relevant for achieving ministerial office. The article concludes that scholarship on ministerial selection requires a stronger emphasis for its endogenous nature in government-formation as well as the relevance of temporal dynamics in such processes.
Partisan change outside of the South has not been studied as extensively as in the 11 states of the Old Confederacy. Given the partisan advantage that the Democratic Party enjoys outside of the South, understanding the dynamics of party support among non-southerners appears to be important to study in its own right – not just as a point of contrast to that of the South. The goal of this article is to update and expand on one of the few pieces of scholarship to probe the reasons for the survival of the Democratic Party outside of the South. Using data from the American National Election Studies, the article concurs with these findings, that the Democratic Party has been successful in maintaining support among low income whites outside the South. However, a class-based explanation offers a partial explanation for the Democratic advantage in party identification. Ideological realignment has also expanded the Democratic base among middle and high income liberals and moderates. Overall, the findings of the article suggest that the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party outside of the South should be favourable for some time to come. The Democratic Party has not just survived outside of the South, it has prospered, and this provides a decided advantage for the party in national elections.
What explains when Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) defect from their EP party group? While previous research has focused on the policy distance between an MEP's national party and her party group, it has been overlooked that not all issues are equally important to national parties. As parties prioritize certain issues over others, we argue that it is both the distance and the salience of the issue for the MEP’s national party that explains defection. To test our theoretical claim, we explore more than 400,000 vote decisions across 1,948 different roll-call votes in four issue areas – agriculture, environment, social policy and external trade – from 1979 until 1999. To measure policy salience and distance, we combine roll-call analysis with data from the Euromanifestos Project. Our findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of party competition and the role that national parties play in the European Parliament.
This article analyzes and compares the politics of European policy-making within the British Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) between 1997 and 2012. We know that party leaders have assumed much autonomy in the making of European policy, but, as with policy-making in any area, their autonomy is constrained and sometimes even questioned by other parts of the party. In order to establish how they are constrained, and what factors increase the level of constraint, this study explores the roles played by four party actors in the making of European policy: conferences, national executive committees, Members of Parliament and Members of the European Parliament. This article, which is based on over 35 interviews with EU experts from the three parties, confirms that European policy was generally made by the party leadership. Other party actors, however, were able to influence the leadership on a small number of occasions. The extent of their influence depended upon the polity, party, policy and politics.
The individualization of politics is usually studied in relation to party leaders. Using new data from the Norwegian Candidate Survey 2009 and in-depth interviews with 29 top candidates, in this article we study whether candidates in the Norwegian 2009 parliamentary election ran party-centred or individualized campaigns. We distinguish between the organizational aspects and the communicative focus of the candidates’ campaigns. Moreover, we argue theoretically and show empirically how campaigns can be localized but still party-centred. The analysis shows that there are low levels of individualized campaigning in Norway, but that there are differences between candidates, especially based on party affiliation. Moreover, the differences are first and foremost related to the communicative focus, not the organizational aspects. While candidates highlight the importance of localizing the campaign, the results show that this is mostly about ‘translating’ the national campaign strategy to the regional or local level, not about independent local strategies.
This article takes a closer look at how presidential elections affect the fragmentation of the legislative party system. It reviews the theory and conventional empirical modelling strategy; identifies some drawbacks to this strategy and suggests solutions; and then conducts an empirical investigation of the implications of this critique by combining replication data from Golder (2006) with new data on the key variables measuring the presidential coattails. Fortuitously, the literature’s findings about the shadow cast by presidential elections, usually known as the presidential coattails, are relatively robust. However, important differences emerge on the margins, such as regarding the effect of midterm elections. Moreover, this article demonstrates that subsequent presidential elections, like concurrent and preceding ones, cast shadows, too. It also demonstrates that the conventional modelling strategy underestimates the presidential coattails.
This article investigates how parties can influence the level of political sophistication their supporters have. Although the importance of parties in providing their supporters with political information was first suggested in early studies of voting behaviour, this level of analysis has been omitted from individual studies of political sophistication. Focusing on the political environment of post-communist societies, where parties played a key role in helping citizens understand politics, I theorize both a direct and an indirect path through which parties can contribute to the level of sophistication of their supporters. Using cross-national data from the Eurequal 2007 project on 13 post-communist countries, I show three characteristics related to parties' motivation to mobilize the electorate against the status quo that have an impact on individual level political sophistication. Results from a multi-level model suggest that supporting a non-incumbent, smaller or right-wing party is related, either directly or in interaction with individual characteristics, to higher levels of political sophistication. These findings shed light on how looking at political parties can help us better understand the differences in the levels of political sophistication among citizens.
I argue that political parties oriented towards particularistic goods affect coalition government in presidential systems. Particularistic parties hire out their support on some item(s) of the presidential agenda in exchange for locally targeted policies or resources under the control of presidents. They are relatively cheap coalition partners for presidents in policy terms and their representation in the legislature provides presidents with coalitional flexibility. My empirical analysis of cabinets in 10 Latin American countries shows that when particularistic parties hold a larger share of the legislative seats minority presidents are less likely to form majority governments and more likely to change the party composition of their cabinets.
The literature on democratic consolidation emphasizes the importance of effective parties for the functioning of democracy. Specifically, the institutional resilience of democracy and the consolidation of broad-based representative government require the institutionalization of major political factions. In this article, I reassess this thesis and apply it to the political parties in Turkey and Southern Europe by employing the comparative method of difference. Two major conclusions are reached. First, party institutionalization does not constitute a sufficient condition for democratic consolidation. Moreover, several institutional rules that may challenge the very idea of democracy tend to support party institutionalization. Second, party institutionalization reinforced by partisan polarization may result in tenser relations among political parties – a situation that does not contribute to democratic consolidation.
Existing analyses of the Turkish party system suggest that it is unique in several respects. Upper-class voters tend to support the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the centre-left social democratic party, while poorer voters support the right. Unlike party systems in Western democracies, expert surveys find that a religious–secular divide, and not a socio-economic divide, best explains the general left–right dimension. Qualitative literature stresses Turkey’s uniqueness due to the long history of the CHP, its close ties to the bureaucracy and military, and the role of the military in politics. Lastly, existing quantitative measures of policy positions disagree about the placement of major parties. We estimate the principle dimension of Turkish party competition using electoral manifestos as data by applying the Wordfish scaling algorithm. We find that ideology in Turkish politics is reversed, with the nominally centre-left CHP employing more populist rhetoric typically associated with right-wing parties in the West, and vice versa.
Gamson’s Law of office distribution tells us approximately how many ministries each member of a coalition will receive. However, the question of which ministries are allocated to which parties according to a more general party motivation remains largely open. In a model-theoretic investigation of portfolio allocation we focus on the characteristics of the distributional process concerning the qualitative differences of ministries: which motivation drives parties to choose or disregard certain ministries? Applying the technical framework of divisor methods for our model and estimating party preferences according to their election manifestos, we find that substance indeed does matter. Parties seek to obtain ministries in those policy fields which they mention more intensively in their electoral manifestos and at the same time spread their ministerial control broadly. Furthermore, we find that bigger parties are not qualitatively repaid for their usually observable quantitative loss.
When do coalitions do what they promise? Previous research has focused on the extent to which parties implement electoral pledges. In this article, we examine how coalition cabinets fulfil post-electoral legislative agendas. Many coalitions announce programmes identifying bills that they plan to introduce to parliament in the months ahead. Even though coalition parties publicly signal commitment to all such proposals, there is variation in the extent to which cabinets meet their own deadlines. We argue that pledge fulfilment is driven by differences in the divisiveness and salience of legislative initiatives. We test our theoretical expectations based on an empirical analysis of over 500 legislative pledges made by the Polish cabinet between 2008 and 2011. Our results confirm that pledges dealing with less divisive and more salient issues are likely to be fulfilled with less delay than those dealing with more divisive and less important issues.
Are the effects of candidate selection through party primaries largely disruptive for political parties or do they have some redeeming features? Icelandic parties have used inclusive nomination procedures since the early 1970s on a scale that is without parallel in other parliamentary democracies. The Icelandic primaries thus offer a unique opportunity to study the effects of primaries in a context that is quite distinct from the most studied primary election system, i.e. the United States, which is characterized by federalism, presidential government and two-party competition. Our findings indicate that, despite four decades of primaries, the Icelandic parties remain strong and cohesive organizations, suffering almost none of the ailments predicted by critics of primary elections. We are careful to point out, however, that context matters and the way parties have adapted also plays a role.
While national election campaigns have become increasingly personalized, it is unclear to what extent this trend has been replicated at the constituency level. Using surveys of Australian election candidates conducted from 1996 to 2010, this article tests the personalization hypothesis at the local constituency level. Three areas that may be affected by personalization are examined: constituency service; geographic proximity between candidates and potential voters; and local election campaigning. Among MPs, constituency service has grown in importance at the expense of local party engagement. However, among the broader group of candidates standing in the election, the results show that party-related activities deliver more votes than personal ones.
The electoral success of many West European Christian Democratic parties as prototypical people’s parties has been threatened in recent years by growing secularization and economic trends. In the light of these challenges, this article analyses the importance of social and attitudinal variables in predicting support for seven Christian Democratic parties at the individual level using data from the European Social Survey. The results highlight the continuing centrality of religion in Christian Democratic voting. Regular attendance at church, particularly among Catholics, raises the probability of supporting Christian Democracy at the ballot box substantially. Class, by contrast, offers a weak guide as to the likelihood of a Christian Democratic vote. The importance of religion is such that expectations about other potentially important independent variables (character of domicile, age) are generally not met. Yet the reliable support of religious voters is increasingly an ambiguous electoral asset with clear signs that this partisan constituency is in decline throughout Western Europe.
I argue that the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan employed a strategy to prevent unpopular prime ministers from tainting the party’s image. Time-series analyses of public opinion data from 1960 to 2006 show that national economic performance had modest effects on prime minister support ratings and no effects on LDP ratings. When prime minister ratings fall below party ratings, cabinets are more likely to be reshuffled and prime ministers to be replaced to avoid having the cabinet’s negative image ‘rub off’ on the LDP. Although electoral rules, culture, and other factors surely play a role in sustaining the LDP, I show for the first time that the party manages its cabinet personnel strategically to maintain support.
What kinds of candidates do former rebel groups that transform into political parties recruit to their electoral banner after a civil war? Although there has been a growing literature on the transformation of rebel groups into political parties, there is remarkably little literature on the candidates they recruit to run in elections. Using a unique dataset that codes individual level candidate characteristics, we examine the kinds of candidates that a former rebel group, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), recruited to run in the single-member plurality districts in the first Constituent Assembly Election in 2008 after the end of the Nepalese civil war. In particular, we examine two key questions: Who did the CPN(M) recruit to run under the banner of the party? Where did they nominate different kinds of candidates? The results suggest that the Maoists recruited candidates based on characteristics of the districts, not unlike what would be expected of most parties. Highly placed party officials were nominated in districts that were relatively ‘safe’, whereas the party nominated candidates that were non-party elites who had been recruited after the end of the civil war in districts that were ‘competitive’.
Does the number of political parties influence voter turnout in developing democracies? Some scholars argue that large party systems facilitate matching voter preferences with a specific party, increasing turnout. Others argue multiparty systems produce too many alternatives, decreasing turnout. In developing democracies, there is debate over whether these institutions matter at all. We argue that party systems do matter for turnout in developing countries, but the relationship between turnout and the number of political parties is conditional on the electoral formula. Under proportional representation systems, large numbers of parties increase turnout. Under winner take all systems, large numbers of parties depress turnout. Since electoral rules also influence the number of parties, we use an innovative sub-national research design, taking advantage of local variation in the number of parties that is largely unrelated to the electoral system. Specifically, we test these relationships by analysing turnout data at the municipal level in Brazil and Bolivia, countries with very different electoral rules. Overall, we find evidence that party systems influence turnout, but in different ways depending on the election rules.
Prior research has shown that institutions affect parties’ incentives to coordinate within elections or compete on their own. However, no study to date has examined the way that institutions affect when parties coordinate in the most important of electoral contests: the presidential race. In this article, we explain which institutions encourage parties to run as part of pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) or shun them and run on their own in the race for the presidency. Using an original dataset of over 1400 parties that sponsored a candidate on their own or ran as part of an alliance in presidential elections across 23 democracies in Europe and South America from 1975 to 2009, we find that the powers of the presidential office, electoral rules and multi-level governance determine when parties decide to enter the race on their own or form an alliance. Our findings have important implications for understanding party competition in semi-presidential and presidential systems.
Electorates appear to be adrift. Across Western Europe electoral volatility is increasing. But are volatile voters whimsical? Do they behave randomly, like drift sand, or are they emancipated, not committed to a single political party but loyal to their own preferences? To answer these questions this study focuses on the Dutch electorate, which has become the most volatile in Western Europe. We analyse the extensive 1Vandaag Opinion Panel (1VOP) dataset, which covers 55,847 adult respondents who participated in at least 2 of the 58 waves between November 2006 and June 2010. 1VOP allows us to break down electoral volatility by type, direction (intra-bloc versus inter-bloc) and time span. We conclude that volatility reflects voter emancipation rather than disengagement. Although more than half of the respondents (55 percent) change party preference at least once, they mostly stick to one of two ideologically coherent party blocs. Especially middle groups are volatile: people with modal income, with average levels of education and who position themselves in the political centre. However, the lower educated are more likely to switch between dissimilar parties. Our findings question the socialization model: although older voters are relatively loyal when they cast their ballots, they are the most volatile in the years in between.
In the voting behaviour literature, political organizations are often mentioned as playing an important role in mobilizing a deactivated electorate. Nevertheless, researchers have paid little attention to the relationship between organization strength and Black voter participation. In this study, a direct test of the organizational strength hypothesis is examined by utilizing official voter turnout data at the county level from the November 2004 elections. Controlling for socio-demographic factors, campaign factors and the impact of Black Churches, the findings show that there is a positive and significant relationship between political organizations and Black turnout. The findings suggest that the Democratic Party and civil rights organizations can play a critical role in promoting Black turnout if they improve upon their organizational features.
Unlike existing approaches to the study of ethnic politics, this article argues that the political competition for ethnic votes in modern democracies is programmatic (i.e. distinguishable by its focus on issues and policies), much like the competition for voting blocs defined as based on class or gender. Analysing ethnic appeals in this manner makes them suitable for the type of quantification and comparative analyses now standard in the estimations of policy positions on a range of other issues. Once the policy concerns of ethnic communities are known, scaling and scoring them becomes possible, paving the way for quantification and rigorous comparative work. Drawing on content analysis of speeches and manifestos delivered in democracies over the past decades, the article identifies a list of political positions reflective of appeals made to ethnic communities. Further, it derives and validates two indices of ethnic campaigning using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. The measures are shown to be more robust and sensitive to nuance than existing classifications and can be readily applied to testing various hypotheses regarding the political competition for ethnic votes in democracies.
Hate speech prosecution of politicians is a common phenomenon in established democracies. Examples of politicians tried for hate speech include Nick Griffin in Britain and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. Does hate speech prosecution of politicians affect the electoral support for their party? This is an important question, as the parties involved typically are controversial, often accused of stirring up political cynicism or political violence. The relevant literature has largely ignored this question, however. In this article, we use data from a representative sample of Dutch voters interviewed before and re-interviewed after the unexpected court decision to prosecute MP Geert Wilders. We demonstrate empirically that the decision substantially enhanced his party’s appeal. This resulted in an immediate increase in support for the party by one to five percentage points among those who are moderately in favour of the assimilation of ethnic minorities into Dutch culture. In addition, the evidence suggests that the decision contributed to the party’s subsequent electoral lift-off. Our findings call for investigations into the electoral effects of legal proceedings against political actors in democratic systems worldwide.
This article offers a spatial theory to explain how a centrist third party gains votes via the ideological depolarization of its two main competitors towards the centre ground. Using the cases of British elections in 2001, 2005 and 2010, during which the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, were ideologically similar, the article reveals how perceived similarities between these parties led voters to turn to alternative issues and criteria – which benefited the third party, the Liberal Democrats – to decide their vote. Major parties therefore trade a proximity benefit of chasing the median voter against a separation benefit whereby votes can be lost due to voter indifference. The expectations are supported by analyses of vote choices using two measures of indifference, although the incentives do not apply equally in all three elections. The article reveals that indifference is not just relevant to voter abstention, as applied in existing spatial theories, but is also relevant to the basis of the vote choice and to votes for third parties. The implications are important for spatial models of party competition.
Horizontal accountability, in which institutional actors with equivalent levels of authority possess tools to challenge one another, is a critical component of mature and stable democracy. This article investigates ways in which partisanship differentiates how political actors use a specific accountability tool – legislative questions – and the responsiveness of government institutions to inquiries. We take advantage of the unanticipated change in Ukraine's executive leadership in 2004 to assess the relationship between partisan identity and accountability. The analysis of nearly 16,000 legislative requests from Ukraine illustrates the pivotal role of partisanship in accountability and institutional responsiveness, a finding that is particularly notable given Ukraine's inchoate party system and under-developed democratic norms.
The role of members of political parties is ambiguous because it entails both benefits and costs. In order to shed light on the question of whether members are an asset or a liability for parties, I examine whether parties use their ideology on a left–right dimension as a collective incentive for the appeal to actual and potential party members. A quantitative analysis of the effects of changes in membership on partisan ideological change, covering 61 parties in 11 Western democracies from the 1950s to the early 1990s, shows that there is a weak, but statistically significant, effect. An additional analysis of two mechanisms by which membership has an effect refutes the alternative explanation that positional changes of the median member account for partisan ideological change. In total, the results indicate that members are both an asset and a liability and that parties try to keep the two in balance.
This article theorizes the strategies used by parties to expand their support base, with a particular focus on the allocation of party goods. Here, we theorize that nascent parties with goods to hand out will favour a particular type of societal group, which we name private-gain-seeking groups. We utilize Peru’s party system collapse following Fujimori’s rule as an opportunity to test our hypotheses, which state that political parties will favour electorally volatile groups with restricted access to information or compromised opportunities to process it. Evidence for the hypotheses is found using data on the FONCODES allocation patterns of approximately 750 mayoral districts in Peru. The data suggest that groups expected to be favoured could end up receiving shares 34 percent greater than the least attractive groups.
Existing studies have paid a great deal of attention to how electoral systems affect party politics, but there has been little discussion in the literature on the effects of party registration rules. The theoretical importance of the impact of party registration rules on party system development lies in its temporal priority to the effects of electoral systems. This study aims to fill the theoretical void by conducting a systematic analysis of the effects of party registration rules in Latin America. Using an original dataset of petition signature requirements and spatial registration requirements in 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2011, I conduct cross-national time-series analyses on how this institution affects the number of parties. The empirical results show that a more restrictive petition signature requirement significantly reduces the number of electoral parties in a country, while a spatial registration requirement does not significantly affect the number of parties.
In this article, using our original data on party leadership succession in 23 parliamentary democracies, we investigate the determinants of a party leader’s survival rate: how long he/she remains in office. Unlike previous studies, which focus on institutional settings of leadership selection or on situational (political, economic and international) conditions at the time of succession, we propose a perceptual theory of leadership survival, focusing on the expectations of party constituents (or indirectly, the voting public) who have the power to remove a leader. Specifically, we argue that they ‘benchmark’ their expectation of a current party leader’s performance by comparing it against their memory of that leader’s immediate predecessor. Empirically, we show that party leaders who succeeded a (very) long-serving party leader and/or a leader who had also been the head of government experience lower longevity than others, making these types of predecessor ‘hard acts to follow’.
The literature on authoritarianism and exclusive forms of nationalism often implies that authoritarian and exclusive-nationalist individuals will prefer radical right-wing populist parties such as Austria's FPÖ. The theoretical case for such implications appears sound as party programmes for radical right-wing populist parties invoke rhetoric that should appeal to individuals with either of these characteristics. To date, these implications have not been examined. This article examines quantitative survey data from five Western European countries with electorally viable radical right-wing populist parties to determine whether radical right-wing populist parties are preferred by authoritarians and/or exclusive-nationalists. Analyses indicate that the radical right-wing populist parties studied here are consistently preferred by exclusive-nationalist individuals, though not necessarily to all other parties, but only inconsistently preferred by authoritarian individuals. While more nuanced investigation is still needed, it is clear that, contrary to the assumptions in the authoritarianism literature, radical right-wing populist parties cannot always rely on authoritarian individuals for support.
A growing literature highlights the importance of leader image as a determinant of voting in contemporary democracies and as a force now paralleling the explanatory power of traditional structural and ideological factors affecting voting choice. Yet the actual effect of leaders in the citizen’s vote calculus remains uncertain because of the potential reciprocal causation between leader evaluation and other vote determinants. Thus, the extent to which voters’ appreciation of leaders depends on their personality traits or on their policies, and how these forces variously influence the vote, is difficult to assess. To cope with this endogeneity problem we rely on instrumental variable estimation and two-stage regression analysis. We are able to show that in the highly polarized 2006 Italian legislative elections the net direct effect of leaders on voting choice was actually weaker than that exerted by issue preferences.
Whereas extant work on issue ownership treats voters’ issue ownership perceptions as independent variables to explain electoral choice or party behaviour, this article examines whether parties can, by communicating on an issue, turn voters' perceptions of issue ownership to their advantage. In contrast to most previous studies that have focused on competence ownership – measured as a party's capacity to handle an issue – this article analyses the short-term and long-term impact of campaign messages on voters' perceptions of associative ownership, which refers to the voters’ spontaneous party–issue association, regardless of whether or not voters consider the party as the most competent at dealing with the issue at hand. Based on an online experimental design in Belgium, we show that parties are unable to steal issues that are associated with another party. However, by communicating on their own issues, parties can reinforce their reputation as an associative owner – but only in the short run and only if their previous ownership reputation is not overly strong.
This study aims to offer empirical evidence of how electoral systems influence the way legislators represent their constituencies. In particular, it analyses the influence of electoral systems on legislators’ representations in terms of a pattern of policy areas represented by them. By comparing legislators’ behaviour under Japan’s multi-member district, single non-transferable vote and single-member district systems, I demonstrate that electoral systems with higher district magnitude (i.e. higher number of seats per district) are more likely to offer electoral incentives for legislators to represent specific benefits, including particularistic interests in targeted policy areas. On the other hand, electoral systems with lower district magnitude are more likely to provide electoral incentives for representing diverse benefits, including general interests in various policy areas.
Abundant research provides evidence that electoral systems have an impact on party system fragmentation. Taking up these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article explores the effect of electoral refoms on electoral disproportionality. Specifically, it demonstrates that permissive changes in the electoral system improve the overall correspondence between vote-shares and seat-shares of parties. The explanation is that underrepresented parties in the parliament obtain more seats the more inclusive the electoral rules become. Likewise, disproportionality is higher after a restrictive electoral reform. The article employs my own data on electoral reforms from 59 established and new democracies between 1945 and 2010. Evidence is found not only that electoral reform has an effect on electoral disproportionality as measured with the Gallagher’s least squares index, but also that this impact is in turn conditioned by the size of the change in the rules and the level of democratic experience.
Why do members of parliament (MPs) vote against the party line? Recent explanations of party unity focus on MPs cross-pressured between the demands of competing principals such as their party and local constituencies. This article tests key claims of the Competing Principals Theory on the level of individual deputies. It relies on public statements in which MPs explain their voting behaviour. This new data source allows more direct insights into MPs’ decision-making calculus than roll-call data. The article develops a theoretical model for the usage of such statements and the position MPs take vis-à-vis the party line. Empirically, it studies Explanations of Votes on all roll-call votes in the 16th German Bundestag (2005–2009) statistically controlling for sample selection. The analyses show among others things that district MPs take more critical stances, party leaders dissent less and government MPs are more likely to voice reservations without defecting in voting.
Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at the internal debates held during party congresses and analysing motions presented by party factions through quantitative text analysis, the present article provides a new measure of intra-party polarization that is exogenous to the parliamentary arena. This measure is used to disentangle the effect of ideological heterogeneity on MPs voting behaviour, net of the party whip. Our results show that factional heterogeneity negatively affects party unity. This effect, however, is conditional on the strength of whipping resources available to the party leader. When the electoral system or the intra-party candidate selection process allows strong discipline to be enforced, the negative effect of heterogeneous preferences on party unity is lower or no longer significant. However, since absences can be a strategy by which to express dissent while avoiding sanctions, they should be considered as an additional voting option and this is crucial to understanding the impact of intra-party heterogeneity on party unity.
This work considers how a ruling party in an increasing authoritarian regime utilizes legislative electoral system changes. It argues that the placement of former district deputies on the list of Russia’s ruling party after the move to a PR-only system reflected an interest in expanding its presence in the countryside as well as the attractiveness of the ruling party to the former district deputies themselves. It submits that both the party’s willingness to place former district deputies on its list and the willingness of the deputies to accept positions should vary by previous party affiliations, yielding predictable patterns in the aggregate. In terms of list ranking, it finds that the ruling party’s district deputies received significantly better placement than previously independent deputies, but not better placement than district deputies who made the list but had competed under a different party label in the previous election.
Why did pro-welfare Social Democrats and Christian Democrats cease to support the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, and support measures such as tighter welfare programme conditionality rules and lower social security benefits instead? Building on the party position change literature, I argue and empirically demonstrate that parties with an activist-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the party voter position. Parties with a leadership-dominated party organization adapt their position to shifts in the median voter position. Parties in which neither leaders nor activists dictate party policy shift in the opposite direction of the previous policy shift if they are excluded from office. Using a cross-sectional time-series regression analysis of 181 position shifts of European Socialist, Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties in the period 1977–2003, I find strong evidence that party organization is a crucial mediating variable in explaining when these parties shift to the right or left. Demonstrating that differences in party organizations motivate parties to respond to different incentives, this study has implications for the relationship between party behaviour and welfare state policy-making.
I use quantitative textual analysis of the Israeli Knesset’s legislative debates to analyse legislative parties’ strategies. The analysis demonstrates three results. First, given an opportunity provided by an exogenous shock to the Israeli political system, dovish opposition parties used their floor speeches strategically to emphasize a frame of Israeli security on which the hawkish majority held a losing position. Second, due to its weak position, the hawkish coalition eventually ‘deserted’ the frame. Third, this dynamic resulted in a major change in the legislative discourse on security, and in the consolidation of a frame of security that highly favoured the opposition. I argue that this strategy constitutes rhetorical heresthetic, since it emphasizes the internal contradictions of the majority and contributes to its split. In general, these results demonstrate that legislative rhetoric is an important venue of oppositional behaviour, especially given the limited agenda control the majority has over legislative speeches. Finally, the model is generalizable to measuring dynamic partisanship in various political institutions.
This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999-2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.
Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electorally relevant party attachments in democratic electorates, this article demonstrates that parliamentary party leaders have their strongest impact not when, as is usually the case, they are conceptualized as electoral forces in their own right, but when evaluations of them as individuals are moderated by voters’ matching evaluations of the parties contesting the election. Comparing (aligned) Australia and (dealigned) Britain, it is shown that election-time party evaluations condition the magnitude of leader effects independently of the strength of party identification in the electorate.
This article estimates policy positions of mainstream parties and radical right parties in seven countries in Western Europe over the past two decades. The assumption that mainstream parties have moved rightwards under pressure from the electoral success of radical right parties is assessed in close-up. A fine-grained analysis has been used to measure party distances in this specific policy field. Moreover, the new dataset is sufficiently differentiated to enable the identification of specific programmatic strategies followed by mainstream parties. The article concludes that the impact of radical right parties on mainstream policy agendas tends to be overestimated.
European radical left parties (RLPs) are gradually receiving greater attention. Yet, to date, what has received insufficient focus is why such parties have maintained residues of electoral support after the collapse of the USSR and why this support varies so widely. This article is the first to subject RLPs to large-n quantitative analysis, focusing on 39 parties in 34 European countries from 1990 to 2008. It uses the ‘supply and demand’ conceptual framework developed for radical right parties to identify a number of socio-economic, political-cultural and party-system variables in the external environment that might potentially affect RLP support. The article finds the most persuasive variables to include political culture (past party success), the level of unemployment, Euroscepticism and anti-globalization sentiment, the electoral threshold and competition from Green and radical right parties. The findings suggest several avenues for future research and provide a framework that can be adapted to explain the electoral success of other party families.
Datasets in the field of ethnic politics still tend to treat ethnonational groups as unitary actors and do not differentiate between the positions of the organizations representing these groups. Datasets in the field of party politics differentiate between the positions of political parties, yet fail convincingly to conceptualize an ethnonational dimension of competition. This Research Note presents EPAC, a new dataset on Ethnonationalism in Party Competition that seeks to fill this gap. Based on an expert survey, EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the ethnonational positions of 210 political parties in 22 multinational European democracies. The conceptualization of an ethnonational dimension of competition underlying the dataset is introduced and a series of validity and reliability tests performed. Test results show that EPAC provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension that can serve as an empirical base for study of the causes and effects of the mobilization of ethnicity in party competition.
The results of the 2009 Bundestag election and subsequent Land elections suggest that the German party system is changing fundamentally. A few facts suffice to corroborate this statement: Volatility has now reached levels that were last recorded in the 1950s; turnout in national elections has reached an all-time low; the two large parties have had unprecedentedly poor results in the Bundestag elections while all three smaller parties reached more than 10 percent. The article shows that German catch-all parties are about to lose their hold on the electorate and, as a result, can no longer rely on being the senior parties of government. The article analyses these changes systematically using a range of quantitative indicators covering the entire post-war period. It shows a seminal erosion of the forces which have stabilized the German party system in earlier decades and discusses the repercussions for the functioning of German party democracy.
This article presents a unified theory explaining several conflicting empirical observations in the politics of campaign finance. It identifies those circumstances that foster or frustrate the enactment of financing laws that increase the competitiveness of elections. I argue that the competitiveness of financing laws is a result of three strong incentives when they operate in differently structured party systems. First, lawmakers have an incentive to make laws to protect their incumbency from competitors. This incentive generally overwhelms the (weaker) incentive to enact popular, competition-enhancing reforms. Secondly, lawmakers, when they act through political parties, have an incentive to cooperate with rivals to reduce the costs of political defeats. Thirdly, lawmakers seek to enact reforms that are consistent with their normative goals. These incentives combine with several party system variables to determine when campaign finance reform is likely to occur and how it will impact on the competitiveness of elections.
Coalition governance is a challenge for political parties because it involves cooperation and compromises between parties that have different political goals and are competitors in political elections. Coalition coordination is crucial for the intra-coalitional cooperation of the governing parties. A key element in coalition coordination is coalition agreements, which to a varying degree constrain the behaviour of the coalition partners. This article explores the share of laws that were precisely defined in government agreements and/or legislative agreements, and sets out to explain variation in this share of coalition agreement-based laws. The analyses are based on unique data on legislative as well as governmental coalition agreements entered by three Danish governments with varying parliamentary strength. This study brings the blooming literature on coalition agreements one step further by showing that coalition governance is influenced by government strength. The legislative practice of strong coalition governments is less accommodative but more pre-regulated by coalition agreements.
The concept of New Politics is rarely translated into actual political measures differentiated from measures of Old Politics. This article presents a new approach to the categorization of policy measures as either leftist or rightist on an Old Politics or New Politics dimension. The approach is tested on climate policies expressed in the electoral manifestos of four Norwegian parties considered to be representative of the Old Left, Old Right, New Left or New Right. The analysis suggests that it is possible to incorporate actual politics in the hypothesis on New Politics. The article’s main contribution is theoretical rather than empirical, but evidence is presented that points to New Politics as an addition to Old Politics, rather than as a replacement or New Politics being absorbed by Old Politics.
Most analyses of congressional voting, whether theoretical or empirical, treat all roll-call votes in the same way. We argue that such approaches mask considerable variation in voting behaviour across different types of votes. In examining all roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 93rd to the 110th Congresses (1973–2008), we find that the forces affecting legislators’ voting on procedural and final passage matters have exhibited important changes over time, with differences between these two vote types becoming larger, particularly in recent congresses. These trends have important implications not only on how we study congressional voting behaviour, but also in how we evaluate representation and polarization in the modern Congress.
The literature on post-communist party politics frequently suggests that membership organizations are not important for political parties in the region, as elections can be won with expensive media-based campaigns. The article tests this argument using the parliamentary elections in Lithuania in the 2000s held under a mixed electoral system. The results suggest that both party membership organization and campaign spending have roughly equal effects on the electoral persistence of political parties. New parties also benefit from both strong membership organizations and high campaign spending.
District magnitude structures the options open to voters and shapes the incentives legislators have to cultivate a personal reputation. But district magnitude can be a proxy of different ‘mechanisms’ tying to the electoral rules the one trait that is capable of attracting a personal vote across a wide range of electoral systems: that is, a legislator’s local roots. For the first time, recent alternative measures regarding the underlying causal variable are tested using new data in the six countries. On the one hand, district magnitude is found to have the predicted differential effect on legislators’ local office-holding in open-list and closed-list systems. Even as the number of legislators having held local office decreases as their electoral constituency grows in size, on the other hand it is intra-party competition that is the key.
This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to identify latent policy dimensions from a dataset obtained from a VAA carried out in Scotland in 2011. These dimensions are used to map the policy positions of supporters of five Scottish political parties. We argue that this tool allows more leverage on understanding the relative locations of parties ‘in the electorate’ in multidimensional policy space.
Despite the growing amount of party regulation, we still have a limited understanding of the effect that party laws have on party systems and political competition. Notwithstanding predictions that incumbent parties adopt rules which favour their own position, found in both the cartel party thesis and the rational actor view of politics, we continue to witness the frequent appearance of new political parties, some of which successfully enter parliament. Using comparative electoral data and a newly built dataset on party regulation in post-war Europe, we trace the changes in the rules governing political parties and explore the effect of party regulation on the number of successful new entrants. Overall, we find that more regulation significantly decreases the number of successful new entries, while high electoral volatility and the legacy of post-communism increase the amount of successful new party entries in the legislature. Our nalysis further shows that the existence of public funding and the payout threshold have no effect on the permeability of party systems.
A growing body of research demonstrates that parties are vital for the health of democracy. While party activities are therefore increasingly supported by direct public subsidies, we know relatively little about the ways in which parties spend this money. Using an original dataset of intra-party cash transfers, this article examines resource allocation in three major Mexican parties. The analysis demonstrates that parties’ spending patterns differ. Decentralization, which has increased the power and prestige of subnational office, prompts all parties to focus spending on states holding local elections. Parties with a regionalized support base, however, invest primarily in states where they are competitive. This tendency to favour party strongholds has important implications for party system development, particularly for party system nationalization, as well as for emerging work on subnational authoritarianism.
This article revisits one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed in the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate why the claim that demands for drastic redistribution led to democratic breakdown is not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we contend that the coup was the product of a polarizing political realignment that led to a legitimacy crisis. We evaluate this argument using estimates of Argentine legislators’ latent preferences (ideal points) between 1916 and 1930. Our roll-call data analysis suggests that disputes over socio-economic issues did not precipitate the breakdown of the regime. What mattered was the allocation of political power. These findings support the view that stable democracy requires that all major groups in society have a sufficiently large chance of being in power.
High levels of party voting cohesion are common in modern legislatures. Current explanations divide into sociological (based on norms and roles) and rational choice (based on systems of punishment and reward). The latter approach dominates, but cannot explain cohesion in systems with weak disciplinary sanctions, such as the British House of Lords. Social psychology has provided a great deal of insight into conformity in groups, but this has rarely been deployed in studying parties. Neuroscience now also allows us better to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying responses such as need to belong and fear of ostracism. This article outlines key theories and findings from psychology relevant to parliamentary party cohesion, and then explores these using survey data from the relatively ‘discipline free’ House of Lords. It is suggested that psychological factors such as social identity are important to the operation of party groups, and stronger interdisciplinary links are proposed between political science and psychology.
Chile’s parties have been characterized as ‘European’ in their development and institutionalization, but ‘Latin American’ in their high degree of political localism. Yet the specialized literature has not tested these tendencies nor developed a theory as to how they may coexist. Using the concept of party nationalization, we establish the veracity of the claims in the literature and propose a theory of static and dynamic nationalization development. We show that, as in Western European systems, Chile’s political parties exhibited progressive static nationalization until 1973. Since re-democratization, parties have demonstrated low levels of static nationalization, while the coalitions are highly nationalized. Concurrently, both parties and the coalitions have exhibited low levels of dynamic nationalization like parties throughout Latin America. We argue that these conflicting patterns are due to the interactive effect of functional cleavages and electoral institutions.
Social democratic parties have changed their electoral appeals substantially to cater to new voter segments. This article examines social democracy’s fortunes in attracting new voters among the salaried middle class across different electoral systems. Previous research ignored the importance of electoral systems and was inconclusive as to whether social democratic parties succeeded in mobilizing new constituencies. I argue that electoral systems play a crucial role since proportional systems enhance the electoral competiveness of left-libertarian parties, social democracy’s most serious challengers among the salaried middle class. In contrast, majoritarian systems allow social democratic parties to gain a foothold among these voters as left-libertarians remain marginalized. Using ISSP data for 11 Western democracies, the findings demonstrate that social democratic parties were outperformed by their left-libertarian challengers among the salaried middle class under highly proportional systems, but not under majoritarian systems.
Any political party has a profound interest in maximizing seats, which in turn requires running the optimum number of candidates. However, to do this presumes solving a collective action problem among self-interested party members or leaders, and is deeply conditioned by the electoral system. The case of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party under the Single Non-Transferable Vote electoral system provides a superb illustration of how party leaders, even in a famously electorally successful party, will be unable to solve these dilemmas because of key facilitating institutions: first, party president selection rules; second, prime ministerial control over allocation of positions; third, a weak party label. Contrary to existing literature, we find ambitious factions consistently nominated too many candidates – deliberately risking the party’s losing seats. We draw attention to the sources of party strength in a novel way, and to how party rules interact with electoral systems to shape both parties and politics.
Political parties are considered to be vital elements of political life in modern democracies, and whether in democratic regimes they maintain democratic mechanisms within their own organizations and structures has been an intriguing topic. The most important issue is which factors influence the internal democracy in parties. This article examines the relationship between functioning of democracy in parties and party leadership, candidate selection mechanisms, membership systems, policy formulation systems and communication channels. In addition to the commonly used indicators of intra-party democracy in three areas – the leader’s power and control, nomination process and determining policy preferences – this article deals with the process of membership recruitment and membership rights. It analyses the factors that influence intra-party democracy in Turkey focusing on the multiparty period after 1946 by giving examples from the political parties and previous research results.
This article explains the outcome of American labour’s formative stage in politics between 1860 and 1921 by modelling the decision-making process of labour elites under limited and full labour inclusion. Several countries featured limited inclusion through a neutral executive and democratic institutions, but full inclusion – the incorporation of labour into the party system through entrenched partisan elites – occurred only in the United States. An analytic narrative illustrates the conclusion from my decision analysis that the failure of social democracy and the embrace of moderate syndicalism in the United States occurred as the rational response of labour elites to this unique environment.
Research has shown that education is positively correlated with political party membership at the individual level. It is thus puzzling that increased education at the aggregated level in most Western countries has not resulted in an aggregate increase in levels of party membership. One explanation for this paradox is provided by the sorting model of education, according to which there is no direct effect of education on political participation; education affects individuals’ social network positions, which in turn affects political participation. Prior research on the sorting model has focused on the observable predictions derived from the model. The hypothesized causal mechanism, i.e. social network position, has not been sufficiently tested. This article employs Swedish data with comprehensive measures of social relations and utilizes structural equation modelling to test the hypothesized causal relationship. The results confirm that social network position mediates the effect of education on active political party membership.
This article examines why democratic competition sometimes fails to curb governmental corruption. We argue that in democracies party system competitiveness, which shapes the ability of voters to effectively select and control their politicians through elections, plays a critical role in conditioning the scope for corruption. For voters, governmental corruption is a classical principal–agent problem and its magnitude is mediated by the extent to which the competitiveness of a party system helps to make information and effective choices available to the electorate. Informed voters who can coordinate on credible alternatives to under-performing and corrupt incumbents, we argue, can select politicians who are likely to curb corruption and hold accountable those who do not. We test this argument through a controlled comparative analysis of corruption in 70 democracies around the world and find broad support for our hypotheses.
Authoritarian dominant parties are said to ensure elite loyalty by providing elites with regularized opportunities for career advancement. This article uses data on the distribution of leadership posts in Russia’s regional legislatures (1999–2010) to conduct the first systematic test of this proposition. Loyalty to the nascent hegemonic party, United Russia, is shown to be important in determining a legislator’s chances of being promoted to a leadership position. These findings generate insight into how authoritarian institutions help maintain regime stability and provide a clearer picture of how Russia’s ruling party works.
Previous research claims that there is a significant relationship between party systems and democracy. Although party system institutionalization is seen as a necessity for democratic consolidation, the effects of different party system characteristics on democracy are sharply contested. This study contributes to this debate through a systematic analysis of the relationship between two party system characteristics (party fractionalization and party polarization) and level of democracy. It is found that party polarization is positively related to the level of democracy in a country, i.e. the higher level of party polarization can produce the higher level of democracy. It is found, however, that there is no significant relationship between party fractionalization and level of democracy in a country.
Despite a vast pan-European literature on extreme right parties (ERPs), few studies speak convincingly to questions of party membership and activism. This article draws on a unique membership dataset to examine contextual predictors of membership of the British National Party (BNP), currently the dominant representative of the extreme right in British politics. We operationalize and test for the impact of both demand-side and supply-side factors, including the seldom examined effects of historical legacies, and of party activism and electoral success on membership levels. Aside from congregating in urban areas that are more deprived and have low education levels, we also find evidence of a ‘legacy effect’, whereby membership levels are higher in areas with a historic tradition of extreme right activism. This research is the first ever systematic investigation of national extreme right party membership.
Why and when does party headquarters grant autonomy to its local branches, and what trade-offs ensue when providing such discretion? This article tackles these broader questions by focusing on a largely under-investigated area: the impact of directly elected governors and mayors on intra-party dynamics. To facilitate analysis, the article borrows from the ‘delegation’ and ‘franchise’ models, which seek to explain how party organizations adapt to multi-level electoral environments. Sources of intra-party conflict over gubernatorial campaigns derive from theories of party behaviour under presidential systems. Empirical evidence is provided by examining how Japan’s two major parties have dealt with gubernatorial campaigns in recent years. Select cases and data demonstrate how local units are driven by differing incentives from the national leadership, the consequent intra-party conflicts and the limited success of party headquarters in steering its local units. The article discusses the extent to which the ‘franchise’ or ‘delegation’ models successfully capture the way in which the two Japanese parties have engaged in gubernatorial campaigns. To illustrate generalizability beyond Japan, the article ends with a brief comparative counterpoint: intra-party conflict over the selection of the Greater London Authority’s mayoral candidate in 2000 and 2004.
This article provides a novel answer to explain the persistence of party rallies in the mass and social media era. I argue that rallies contribute to the organizational structure of clientelistic parties by providing information to different members within and outside the machine. Rallies provide party leaders with information that enables them to monitor brokers’ capacity to mobilize voters, party brokers with an opportunity to display their ability to turn out voters while monitoring voters’ responses, and voters with an opportunity to display their gratitude or fear towards brokers. In addition, rallies provide the opposition with an opportunity to gather information about the electoral strength or weakness of the clientelistic party. Drawing on participant observations, over a 100 interviews, archival research in Argentina and Peru, and secondary literature for the cases of Mexico and Brazil, I explain why political parties conduct rallies and why rallies will continue in the future.
A significant and influential body of research suggests that electoral systems influence legislators’ behaviour. Yet, individual legislators are potentially motivated by other concerns, such as policy and office. What happens when competing goals predict contradictory behaviour, for example, when electoral incentives clash with enticements to win prized post-election positions (mega-seats)? When party leaders cartelize the allocation of mega-seats, the anticipated effects of the electoral system on legislators’ behaviour may dissolve – creating strong parties in the legislature despite a candidate-centred electoral system. New data on mega-seats and voting behaviour in the Irish parliament between 1980 and 2010 supports the notion that mega-seat considerations trump the impact of the electoral system on roll-call behaviour. The implication is that what goes on within the legislature may be more important for influencing legislators’ behaviour than what goes on at the ballot box.
While complementary in many ways, the cartel and the conditional party government (CPG) theories of legislative party power have disparate expectations for the stability of the majority party’s negative agenda control. Cartel theorists contend that negative agenda control is relatively constant over time, while CPG proponents suggest that this type of veto power varies with intra-party preference cohesion and inter-party preference distinction. In this article, we enter this debate by considering an alternative and under-explored indicator of negative agenda control: participation in discharge petition efforts. Our findings demonstrate the instability of the majority party’s ability to control discharge efforts, with majority party (co)sponsors showing a significantly greater likelihood of ‘waffling’ during periods of stronger party unity and more vigorous leadership power.
The article applies and develops Katz and Mair’s ‘cartel party’ thesis to the Russian case. Challenging the accepted characterization of the Russian party system as ‘hegemonic’, the article contends that this underplays the systemic importance of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its collusion with pro-Kremlin parties in the fields of electoral and party reform. By applying the concepts of cartelization to the Russian case, it appears that the intersection of state and party goes beyond simply the ‘top-down’ establishment of political parties towards a party system in which there is inter-party collusion around a strong state-based regime.
This research examines the effects of party competence perceptions on African–Americans’ party identification. Using ordinary least squares regression to analyse data taken from the 1996 National Black Election Study, I regress African–Americans’ party identification and feeling thermometers for Democrats and Republicans on items that measure African–American assessments of the political parties’ ability to handle certain issues. The results indicate that those matters of race and economics influence party identification. Moreover, party competence perceptions influence partisanship more than party identification. Unlike the literature suggesting that individual factors are not significant, I find that individual life circumstances do influence African–Americans’ party identification.
Several recent articles have reached different conclusions regarding the impact of the religious–secular cleavage in Chile. The resolution of this debate has important consequences for the understanding of cleavages. Studies subscribing to the view that parties have considerable agency in the maintenance of cleavages have found that religiosity no longer affects vote choice, while studies rooted in a sociological perspective argue that religiosity still matters. We show that the reason for the discrepant results is because a partisan realignment is underway, whereby religious voters are gradually shifting their loyalties from the parties of the left to the parties of the right, matching a division that has taken place at the elite level. These results are consistent with an issue evolution perspective, which provides a clearer articulation of how cleavages form than either the agency or the sociological approaches.
In this article I argue that coalitions will tend to employ control mechanisms to facilitate the adoption of compromise policies only when the expected benefit of their use is high enough. When partners are already satisfied with log-rolling policies (compartmentalized by jurisdiction), or when compromise is already attainable self-enforcingly, there are few incentives to use them. Conversely, when partners are interested in compromise policies but are unable to reach that outcome in equilibrium, then control mechanisms are likely to be implemented. The empirical evidence offered tends to support the two main hypotheses of this work: control mechanisms are less necessary when the tangentiality of partners’ preferences is high and when they foresee frequent mutual interactions. However, that seems to work better for the allocation of watchdog junior ministers rather than for the writing of comprehensive policy agreements.
Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions.
Do parties de-emphasize issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters, and are niche parties more likely to do so than mainstream parties? This study builds on previous research demonstrating that parties change their issue positions in response to their supporters. Simultaneously, a number of studies have emerged arguing that the linkage between parties and citizens is moderated by the type of party (mainstream versus niche). By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 197 parties in 14 West European countries between 1986 and 2006, this study provides convincing empirical evidence that parties downplay issues in response to internal divisions among their supporters. There are, however, no differences between niche and mainstream parties in their responsiveness to internal disagreement. This study has important implications for the literature on responsiveness between parties and their supporters, as well as for our understanding of the strategic behaviour of niche vis-à-vis mainstream parties.
While party membership figures are clearly in decline in several Western countries, different interpretations have been offered on the likely consequences of this trend. Some authors stress that members have lost most of their importance for political parties that increasingly rely on professionalized campaign techniques. Other scholars have expressed concern about the decline of party membership. They emphasize the fact that party members continue to function as an important linkage mechanism providing a structural alignment between the party and society (and thus also to potential voters). By means of an election forecasting model for Belgium, we test whether party membership figures can still be related to election results. Results show that party membership has a strong effect on election results and, furthermore, that this relation does not weaken during the period under investigation (1981–2010). The analysis also demonstrates that forecasting models can also be used in a complex multiparty system like that of Belgium.
In this article we investigate the electoral effects of a prominent Dutch Voter Advice Application site (www.kieskompas.nl). Our research design combines factual data on the recommendations received by users from the site’s log files with users’ responses to pre-advice and post-election survey items. We find that the effects of online recommendations on vote choice depend on the congruence of the recommended party with the users’ pre-existing preferences. When the site recommended a party that was being seriously contemplated by the user, the user was demonstrably more likely to go on to vote for the recommended party. We find that this effect was not visible among voters who indicated that they were only seriously considering one party for their vote choice when they visited the site.
This article examines which political parties are the most likely targets of negative campaigning in a multiparty system. The choice of target is an important strategic decision parties make when deciding on their campaign strategy. The article advances existing research on negative campaigning in several ways. First, it is the only paper of its kind to statistically test which parties are most likely to be attacked in a multiparty system and in a non-US setting. Second, it contributes to the development of a general theory on negative campaigning by examining its use in a multiparty system. Finally, it presents new content analysis data on negative campaigning from ten Dutch Parliamentary elections between 1981 and 2010. The findings show that large parties, ideologically proximate parties, parties close to the median party position and government parties are the most likely targets of negative campaigning in the Dutch multiparty system.
While there are relevant studies on both local political subcultures and party activism in Italy, the literature misses the relations between these two social and political phenomena. This article aims at bridging the lacuna by presenting a typology of the local branches of the Italian PD (Democratic Party) based on the relationship between the features of party activism and the local political subcultures. Four types of local PD branch emerge: the ‘showcase’ branch, the ‘administrative’ branch, the ‘company’ branch and the ‘committee’ branch. The article discusses each type, while drawing on 40 in-depth interviews collected during field research. Insights into the relationship between local political subcultures and party activism in Italy are offered.
What keeps politicians together in a political party? Shared ideologies and policy goals go far towards answering that question in established democracies, but in Africa political parties hardly differ from each other in their policy programmes. This leaves party cohesion as an open question. In this study, I attempt to explain the decisions to stay with or defect from political parties made by Members of Parliament in Malawi – a sub-Saharan African country that clearly lacks a salient ideological cleavage. I show that re-election prospects and joining the government significantly determine patterns of party switching. I find mixed evidence that ethno-regional linkages account for loyalty, and no evidence that governing party politicians leave their parties to avoid blame for poor government performance. This study adds to the existing literature on party switching with theory and evidence from a new region.
This article describes two opposing types of political personalization: centralizing and decentralizing personalization. The first implies the centralization of political power in the hands of a few leaders, while the latter indicates a diffusion of group power among its components: individual politicians. We start by proposing definitions of the types and subtypes of centralized and decentralized personalization and review the literature in search of evidence of their occurrence. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed typology by examining personalization trends in various aspects of Israeli politics and conclude with a discussion of the challenges that personalization set for liberal democracies.
In simple plurality voting systems smaller parties facing resource constraints may struggle to field candidates, particularly when the number of electoral districts is large. In the absence of a strong coordinating party organization, the pattern of contestation may also be sub-optimal – the small party fields candidates where support is minimal, ignoring other electoral districts where voters would support the party if it had stood a candidate. This article considers how and whether the separate operation of an Additional Member voting system running parallel to a simple plurality system assists smaller parties by providing low-cost information about the spatial distribution of voter support. Using aggregate voting data collected at the London ward level for both simple plurality local council elections and the separate mixed-member proportional system used to elect the Greater London Assembly we test whether the Green Party demonstrated an ability to modify and optimize its pattern of contestation. There appears to be little evidence of either a contagion or learning effect in respect of the location of Green candidates, suggesting that a free but valuable data source is unexploited.
In their seminal book, Bartolini and Mair (1990: 44–5) proposed the cleavage salience index (CS) to capture ‘the salience of the cleavage, that is, its importance and weight within the general context of the electoral behaviour of a given country and/or period’. In this article, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically that the CS index cannot be used to measure and compare the strength of cleavages over time and for different cleavages. The reason is fairly straightforward; the index does not take into account the actual, absolute level of electoral support for the cleavage block parties, which influences the potential range of the index values. As a better alternative to the original CS index, we propose the block-weighted cleavage salience index (WCS) and provide empirical data about class and religious cleavages in 11 European multiparty systems from 1950 to 2010.
How are party coalitions shaped and reshaped? Elected officials choose coalitions to win elections, but they must work to maintain those coalitions. Non-elected political actors, advancing an ideology at odds with the party coalition, can undermine the party. This article explores this possibility in the case of partisan change on slavery in the Antebellum United States. Intellectuals in 1850 divided into two camps over slavery and the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two parties in Congress. The ideological division matches one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division.
Conflict between factions has been identified as an important factor explaining different procedures of candidate selection. However, the question of what drives factions in choosing certain procedures over others remains under-theorized. This article argues that, when ranking their preferences for candidate selection procedures, factions are influenced by their electoral strategy. While clientelistic factions will push for candidate selection procedures that subordinate themselves to the logic of clientelistic exchange networks, programmatic factions will try to maximize the effectiveness of formal regulations. To demonstrate this relationship, the article studies the recent development of political parties in Taiwan and South Korea, where programmatic factions have ‘outsourced’ the authority to nominate candidates to external actors, thereby moving it beyond the reach of internal patron–client networks.
The literature is still undecided on whether sub-state elections conform more to a national or regional logic of voting. In this article, I argue that the impact of national politics on regional elections is contingent upon the level of decentralization. I hypothesize that the greater the number of policy areas and resources in the hands of regional governments, the lesser the influence of national coat-tails on regional elections. Using the electoral results of the Spanish Socialist Party in national and regional elections from 1979 to 2009, the empirical analysis shows that regional politicians’ electoral performance is correlated to that of their national counterparts. However, this correlation has weakened as regional governments have gained greater decision-making and financing powers. This has been particularly evident in elections when the regional branch of the party rules a single-party government and competes against strong regionalist parties.
A vast literature suggests that voters in new democracies ‘sell’ their vote to patrons providing private or small-scale club goods, or, alternatively, that such goods are distributed along ethnic lines to reinforce ethnic voting. In either case the outcome is undermining democratic accountability. This study finds that citizens in one new democracy – Ghana – expect (and get) the patronage but at the same time engage in economic voting. Eighty-five percent of citizens first and foremost expect their legislators to supply private or small-scale ‘club’ goods. This acts as a strong incentive for politicians to actually supply such goods, which is confirmed by participants’ observational data and more than 250 interviews conducted by the author. Despite this, citizens do not vote based on how well or how poorly incumbent MPs provide clientelistic goods. A multivariate analysis reveals that voting for the opposition or the incumbent is determined by evaluations of the state of the national economy and of the government’s policies. What the literature has portrayed as an ‘either-or’ is ‘both’, and this is perfectly rational: Extract as much as one can in terms of private and small club goods but vote based on economic factors. The literature suggests that clientelism dominates elections in newer democracies and thus undermines democracy. The findings from this study suggest that while distribution of clientelistic goods is common, this does not necessarily undermine the mechanism of democratic accountability in elections.
The article addresses the crucial but still relatively understudied issue of political perceptions, specifically the perceptions of members of parliament (MPs) regarding the positioning of voters on the left–right spectrum, and the accuracy thereof. It focuses on the Portuguese case, which differs from others studied to date in terms of the links between MPs and voters (in contrast to prior research, Portuguese voters do not vote for an MP candidate but for a party list; the representation process is mediated by political parties). The article begins by characterizing Portuguese MP perceptions of voters’ left–right positions, and then explores the reasons for MPs’ perceptual accuracy. The findings show that MP perceptions are shaped by wishful thinking, reiterating previous research, and that party integration is an important new factor explaining perceptual accuracy.
Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshment’s orientations’ model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party.
We present a novel method which can be used to show that contemporary party systems may originate much further back than is usually assumed or might be expected – in reality many centuries. Using data on Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, jurisdictions with party systems that differ significantly, one of which poses significant challenges to the universality of many political science theories, we show how using surnames as markers can confirm the obvious explanation for the Northern Ireland party system and then propose a novel explanation for the Irish party system. We suggest that surnames could be an objective way of studying migration patterns and ethnic heritage which may be important in explaining party systems.
This article classifies the democratic party systems of the world by using the relative-size triangle, a bounded diagram that graphically represents information about seat distributions by party. In particular, the article solves identification problems stemming from the fact that party systems, as recurring patterns of party competition, involve systemic properties that are not reducible to the properties of individual party constellations. On this basis, 162 party systems that existed or continue to exist in the world’s democracies from 1792 to 2009 are assigned to the predominant party, two-party and multiparty types, each of the types being divided into two subcategories. A new measure of party system fragmentation, the systemic effective number of parties, complements the resulting classification with a methodologically consistent assessment of the degrees of multipartism. On this basis, the article arrives at several empirical conclusions regarding the geographical/chronological spread of different party systems and their relative longevity.
To what extent is citizen political participation, such as electronic or personal contact with members of Congress, stimulated by membership in organized interest groups? I use data from a nationwide survey conducted by Zogby in 2007 to assess the extent to which Americans contact congressional offices, and whether membership in more activist-oriented groups, such as citizen groups, stimulates greater rates of contact than membership in professional associations or no group membership at all. I also examine whether this group ‘effect’ on participation breaks down by the method used, low-effort electronic contact (mail, email, web-based contact pages, on-line petitions) versus high-effort contact such as personal meetings with lawmakers. I find that the role played by interest groups in facilitating communication can be substantial. In the case of members from lower socio-economic backgrounds in particular, membership in a citizen group helps compensate for lack of knowledge and resources regarding how to contact Congress.
Since Lipset and Rokkan (1967) published their seminal work on the importance of social cleavages for the ‘freezing’ of party systems more than forty years ago, much has been written on the field demonstrating or discrediting the original hypothesis. In the current article, I examine how cleavage formation and development have influenced the different levels of institutionalization in four new post-communist party systems (i.e. Visegrad). Analysing distinct hypotheses, I arrive at the conclusion that neither the number nor the type nor the strength of a cleavage is associated with the degree of party system institutionalization in East Central Europe. On the contrary, the main conclusion is that party system institutionalization in these democracies has been determined by the way cleavages are structured. In particular, the process of party system institutionalization is found to be hindered when cleavages cross-cut, while fostered in cases where they cumulate (i.e. coincide).
The study of general election outcomes can be helped by finding better approaches for visualizing large quantities of information and asking questions about its patterning. We review the Nagayama or ‘all possibilities' triangle display, and show that it can only legitimately be used to show an overall ‘field’ of results that is logically feasible, called the effective space of competition, which varies with the number of observable parties. We apply this reductionist view to analysing outcomes in three leading plurality rule systems (the USA, India and Great Britain), focusing on evidence of the Duvergerian psychological effect acting on voters during campaign periods. The Effective Competition Space view illuminates some key differences across countries, and variations with rising numbers of parties competing. We next consider a more holistic approach, the ‘crown’ diagram, which links electoral district outcomes more closely to the most important politico-ideological dimension in each country. Both views suggest some tentative evolutionary hypotheses for the variegated development of plurality rule systems over time. Britain is a highly nationalized party system, but one that has moved substantially away from Duvergerian predictions of two-party focusing, and towards multiparty politics. The USA seems to be a case of ‘stunted development’. India shows a partial Duvergerian conformity, yet combined with a substantial vertical scatter of non-Duvergerian results. Applications to over-time and regional analysis within countries are also sketched.
No political institutions enjoy less public trust than political parties. Understanding the implications of this phenomenon for representative democracy requires theoretically informed conceptualizations of party trust and distrust and theories about their underlying cognitive processes. In this vein, the present study conceptualizes party trust and distrust as perceived party trustworthiness, it models citizens' subjective standards as rubrics of party trustworthiness, and it derives rubric-based measures of party trust/distrust. The analyses identify rubrics that: (1) prize integrity and competence, (2) stress internal politics and competence, and (3) give priority to responsiveness and integrity. The rubric-based measures of party trust/distrust converge with a classic measure of party trust and, thus, bolster the conceptual validity and theoretical utility of this research. The results suggest new ways by which to measure party trust and distrust on public opinion surveys.
This article uses underutilized individual-level data to examine who supported two third parties, the Grange and Greenbackers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. We find that Greenbackers attracted individuals employed in non-agrarian occupations and others who were wealthier compared to major party voters. However, the Grange principally appealed to farmers, indicating third parties that are believed to have appealed to similar constituencies often appealed to different electoral groups. Both the Grange and the Greenbackers appealed to voters lacking strong ethnocultural identifications with either major party.
It is commonplace to see political parties as fundamentally constrained by public opinion. By contrast, this paper argues that party competition amplifies mass ideological polarization over public policy. Specifically, the investigation concerns the relationship between mass-level ideology and ethnic exclusionism (the call for harsh immigration policies). As party competition intensifies, this relationship strengthens. The party competition thesis is tested by performing a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden. Unlike their Danish counterparts, Swedish political parties have, most of the time, refused to take opposed stands on immigration policy. In effect, the empirical data show that the individual-level association between self-reported ideology and ethnic exclusionism is considerably stronger in Denmark than in Sweden. To investigate the party competition effect in depth, both longitudinal analyses and a cross-sectional analysis are performed. Data cover the period 1990-2008.
Research on contemporary party organization emphasizes the growing power of the party in public office (PPO). The relationship between the external party organization and the PPO, however, is rarely analysed directly. We argue that the capacity of the extra-parliamentary party to regularly extract a fixed share from their MPs’ salaries – the collection of ‘party taxes’ or ‘tithes’ – can give us insights into the level and the nature of control the external organization exercises over MPs within and across organizational levels. Beyond providing new insights into an under-researched, but generally widespread, source of party funding across 25 parties in five Westminster democracies, the study shows the following: while party family shapes a party’s basic capacity to establish an intra-organizational rule that obliges MPs to regularly contribute parts of their salary, ideology drives the salary share a party can expect MPs to pay. The federal–unitary divide affects whether the national or the regional organizations are the main recipients of these contributions.
Vertical integration is an important concept for political parties. In multi-level or federal contexts, it is said to affect party strength, national integration and federal stability. Despite this, difficulties with the conceptualization and operationalization of vertical integration and a lack of cross-national data impede research. This article clarifies the concept of vertical integration, distinguishing it from related concepts of strength, centralization and autonomy and distinguishing the indicators of integration from the effects of integration. It introduces the measures of vertical integration and autonomy used in the Party Organization in Multi-Level Systems (POMLS) dataset comprising data from survey responses from 204 state-level parties in eight countries. The data confirm the theoretical distinctions among forms of vertical integration and between vertical integration and autonomy and show that not all forms of vertical integration are mutually reinforcing.
The outbidding model of ethnic party competition predicts that ethnic parties adopt radical strategies to maximize support among voters of an ethnic group. In contrast, this article argues that ethnic parties have a wider range of strategies at their disposal. Integrating recent findings, ethnic party strategies are defined by the criteria of appeal and policy position as ‘static bidding‘, ‘ethnic underbidding‘, ‘ethnic outbidding‘, ‘lateral bidding‘, ‘lateral underbidding’ and ‘lateral outbidding‘. Empirically, a comparison of strategies adopted by ethnic parties competing for votes of the Hungarian and Bosniak minorities in Serbia shows variance of strategies within and across groups despite an environment conducive to outbidding and while holding institutional context factors constant. Factors causing this variance are explored through content analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews with ethnic party elites. An explanation that links strategies to parties' goals and the incentives of the structure of intra- and inter-ethnic competition is suggested for further research.
In a region where democratization has led to a proliferation of opposition parties, pre-electoral coalitions represent an obvious means by which to reduce excessive party fragmentation in Africa. However, this article examines whether such coalitions facilitate democratic consolidation in terms of contributing to incumbent turnovers as well as creating competitive, institutionalized party systems. Election data for all opposition coalitions formed in Africa’s electoral democracies since 2000 reveals that coalitions rarely result in incumbent defeat. In addition, I find that a sizeable share of a country’s total electoral volatility is often due to fluctuations in voting for opposition parties that enter and exit coalitions, indicating the inability of coalition members to build loyal constituencies and become institutionalized over time. I argue that this is because many of these coalitions are primarily office-seeking and consist of parties that are distinguished predominantly by the personality of their leaders rather than a distinct political programme that is relevant to the concerns of African citizens.
In this article we investigate how parties ‘close out the electoral market’ by monopolizing the channels of upward mobility for aspiring politicians (by reducing the number of independents). We analyse data from (1228) single-member constituency elections from three sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, Malawi and Zambia) and six national legislative elections. We find that level of incumbent governing party support is the strongest predictor in explaining the likelihood that independent candidates would run for office at the constituency level across all three cases'