The Formation of the National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United Statesby Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman

2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-524
Author(s):  
Joseph LaPalombara
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
National Party

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 1076-1077
Author(s):  
Radhika Desai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
National Party ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Governmental Institutions

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States, Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. xvi, 276.Mining electoral data to arrive at theories about the relationship between political party performance and party system determination and electoral and governmental institutions forms the main stream of political science. And one of its most enduring puzzles is the explanation of the patterns and diversities of party systems. With the famous “Duverger's Law” about single-member plurality systems and two-party political systems forming its point of departure, political scientists have attempted to substantiate their discipline's status as a “science” by producing theories about relationships between measurable political variables.

scholarly journals Introducing new multilevel datasets: Party systems at the district and national levels

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205316801881350
Author(s):  
Cory L. Struthers ◽  
Yuhui Li ◽  
Matthew S. Shugart
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
National Level ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
District Level ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
List Type ◽  
National Party ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Effective Number Of Parties ◽  
Number Of Parties

For decades, datasets on national-level elections have contributed to knowledge on what shapes national party systems. More recently, datasets on elections at the district level have advanced research on subnational party competition. Yet, to our knowledge, no publicly accessible dataset with observations of the party system at both national and district levels exists, limiting the ease with which cross-level comparisons can be made. To fill this gap, we release two corresponding datasets, the National Level Party Systems dataset and the District Level Party Systems dataset, where the unit of analysis is the party system within either the national or district jurisdiction. More than 50 elections in the two datasets are overlapping, meaning they include observations for a single election at both the district and national levels. In addition to conventional measures such as the effective number of parties, we also include underutilized variables, such as the size of the largest party, list type, and the vote shares for presidential candidates in corresponding elections.

scholarly journals The Death of May’s Law: Intra- and Inter-Party Value Differences in Britain’s Labour and Conservative Parties

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172199563
Author(s):  
Alan Wager ◽  
Tim Bale ◽  
Philip Cowley ◽  
Anand Menon
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Value Differences ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Significant Disagreement ◽  
Party Members ◽  
First Time

Party competition in Great Britain increasingly revolves around social or ‘cultural’ issues as much as it does around the economic issues that took centre stage when class was assumed to be dominant. We use data from surveys of members of parliament, party members and voters to explore how this shift has affected the internal coalitions of the Labour and Conservative Parties – and to provide a fresh test of ‘May’s Law’. We find a considerable disconnect between ‘neoliberal’ Conservative members of parliament and their more centrist voters on economic issues and similarly significant disagreement on cultural issues between socially liberal Labour members of parliament and their more authoritarian voters. We also find differences in both parties between parliamentarians and their grassroots members, albeit that these are much less pronounced. May’s Law, not for the first time, appears not to be borne out in reality.

Party Matters

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
National Party ◽  
Strategic Responses ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Real Picture ◽  
The Relationship

This article addresses the relationship between political decentralization and the organization of political parties in Great Britain and Spain, focusing on the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, respectively. It assesses two rival accounts of this relationship: Caramani's `nationalization of politics' thesis and Chhibber and Kollman's rational choice institutionalist account in their book The Formation of National Party Systems. It argues that both accounts are seriously incomplete, and on occasion misleading, because of their unwillingness to consider the autonomous role of political parties as advocates of institutional change and as organizational entities. The article develops this argument by studying the role of the British Labour Party and the Spanish Socialists in proposing devolution reforms, and their organizational and strategic responses to them. It concludes that the reductive theories cited above fail to capture the real picture, because parties cannot only mitigate the effects of institutional change, they are also the architects of these changes and shape institutions to suit their strategic ends.

Party systems and ideological cleavages in the Middle East and North Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 135406881989429
Author(s):  
Abdullah Aydogan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Mena Countries

Previous studies have contrasted the political party systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with those in more democratic countries, raising three important points: (1) the religious–secular dimension, rather than the economic or social left–right, explains the underlying political party competition; (2) left-wing politics is relatively weaker than right-wing politics; and (3) parties that are traditionally known as rightist take left-leaning positions on numerous issue dimensions, and vice versa. Even though this particular literature on party politics in the MENA has greatly improved our understanding of political dynamics in the region, these studies have either lacked quantitative evidence to support these points or their evidence was limited to single-country cases. This study aims to address this issue by analyzing original expert survey data of the ideological positions of political parties in the MENA region. Results show that in addition to the religious–secular dimension, the economic left–right divide and the pace of political reforms are highly important dimensions. The study also provides numerous examples showing that the policy stances of leftist and rightist parties are significantly reversed when MENA countries are compared with more developed democracies.

scholarly journals The Centre Does Not Hold: Coalition Politics and Party System Change in the Netherlands, 2002–12

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huib Pellikaan ◽  
Sarah L. de Lange ◽  
Tom W.G. van der Meer
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Formation ◽  
Party System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Coalition Politics ◽  
Coalition Formation Process ◽  
The Impact

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.

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