Ethnic Parties and Their Candidates Matter

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Karleen Jones West
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
Campaign Strategies ◽  
Ethnic Parties ◽  
Niche Parties ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Party Behavior

This chapter argues that ethnic parties are a type of niche party, while highlighting the political relevance of ethnic parties and providing data on ethnic parties that compete in legislative elections around the world (in Asia, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa). The chapter then explains how the extant literature on ethnic parties is limited because it ignores the behavior of individual candidates campaigning in their districts. A review of the literature on party behavior shows how individual campaign strategies connect with those goals. The chapter concludes by discussing the innovative methodologies this book uses to demonstrate how individual candidates matter in elections; the text also provides an overview of how the rest of the book advances the view that niche parties are similar to other parties in their behavior, largely because they are constrained by the strategies that individual candidates adopt.

The Evolution of Ethnic-Party Behavior

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-95
Author(s):  
Karleen Jones West
Keyword(s):  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
Campaign Strategies ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Ethnic Parties ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Party Behavior

Ethnic parties are not unitary actors, and this chapter shows that their behavior is constrained by the campaign strategies that their individual candidates adopt. By analyzing election results for over five thousand candidates and forty-five parties that have competed in four legislative elections in Ecuador—in 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2009—this chapter evaluates how ethnic parties and their candidates connect with their constituencies. Candidates affiliated with ethnic parties receive greater programmatic support, but only in earlier elections. This change is largely attributable to the behavior of individual ethnic-party candidates, and reflects the evolution of ethnic-party behavior in Ecuador. Building on the theory developed in chapter 2, the text explores why ethnic-party candidates form the linkages with voters that they do. As expected, ethnic-party candidates form more programmatic linkages in districts of higher magnitude, but struggle to form programmatic linkages when they are party leaders and incumbents, suggesting that they are instead connecting with voters on the basis of their personal characteristics.

COLD WAR IN GUINEA: THE RASSEMBLEMENT DÉMOCRATIQUE AFRICAIN AND THE STRUGGLE OVER COMMUNISM, 1950–1958

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH SCHMIDT
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Cold War

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

The Implications of Individual Campaigns, Elections, and Clientelism for Ethnic-Party Behavior

2020 ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
Karleen Jones West
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Developing Democracies ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Ethnic Parties ◽  
Niche Parties ◽  
Indigenous Representation ◽  
Indigenous Movement ◽  
Party Behavior

This chapter discusses some of the implications of the findings of the previous chapters, not only for the Pachakutik party and the indigenous movement, but for all niche parties competing in developing democracies. While ethnic parties certainly provide opportunities for increased indigenous representation, their involvement in the political arena has produced some troubling results. In particular, the chapter focuses on the fragmentation of Pachakutik, the apparent decline in support among the indigenous population, and the reliance on patronage within campaigns as indications of ethnic-party struggles. The chapter also argues that the anticipated positive effects of ethnic parties may be tempered by the barriers they face to achieving their goals of substantive representation within the formal political arena. In the process, the analysis shows how these findings fill a gap in the literatures on ethnic politics, institutions, and party evolution.

Coalitional Presidentialism in Cross-Regional Perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Chaisty ◽  
Nic Cheeseman ◽  
Timothy J. Power
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Case Selection ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Regional Perspective

This chapter introduces the three regions—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Former Soviet Union—and the nine countries—Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine—that provide the empirical material for the book. It introduces the two criteria used for case selection: 1) democratic competitiveness; 2) de jure and de facto constitutional provisions that empower presidents to be coalitional formateurs. It also introduces a variable that measures the salience of cross-party cooperation: the Index of Coalitional Necessity. Finally, it sketches the political landscape that has shaped the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism within each region, and it draws attention to important contextual differences between the nine country cases.

scholarly journals Structure of Dark Triad Dirty Dozen Across Eight World Regions

Assessment ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107319112092261
Author(s):  
Radosław Rogoza ◽  
Magdalena Żemojtel-Piotrowska ◽  
Peter K. Jonason ◽  
Jarosław Piotrowski ◽  
Keith W. Campbell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Measurement Invariance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Dark Triad ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Past ◽  
World Regions ◽  
Dirty Dozen ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Sub Saharan

The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) has garnered intense attention over the past 15 years. We examined the structure of these traits’ measure—the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD)—in a sample of 11,488 participants from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., Asia, Middle East, non-Western Europe, South America, sub-Saharan Africa) world regions. The results confirmed the measurement invariance of the DTDD across participants’ sex in all world regions, with men scoring higher than women on all traits (except for psychopathy in Asia, where the difference was not significant). We found evidence for metric (and partial scalar) measurement invariance within and between W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D. world regions. The results generally support the structure of the DTDD.

Pensée 2: The “African” in Africana/Black/African and African American Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Black African ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Research And Policy

In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.

Candidate Matters

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karleen Jones West
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Vote Buying ◽  
Developing Democracies ◽  
Ethnic Parties ◽  
Niche Parties ◽  
Campaigns And Elections ◽  
Party Behavior ◽  
Latin American Countries

In Candidate Matters: A Study of Ethnic Parties, Campaigns, and Elections in Latin America, Karleen Jones West argues that the characteristics of individual candidates campaigning in their districts shapes party behavior. She does so through a detailed examination of the Pachakutik indigenous party in Ecuador, as well as with the analysis of public opinion in fifteen Latin American countries. Ethnic parties that are initially programmatic can become personalistic and clientelistic vehicles because vote-buying is an effective strategy in rural indigenous areas, and because candidates with strong reputations and access to resources can create winning campaigns that buy votes and capitalize on candidates’ personal appeal. When candidates’ legislative campaigns are personalistic and clientelistic in their districts, niche parties are unable to maintain unified programmatic support. By combining in-depth fieldwork on legislative campaigns in Ecuador with the statistical analysis of electoral results and public opinion, this book demonstrates how important candidates and their districts are for how niche parties compete, win, and become influential in developing democracies. In the process, the author shows that, under certain conditions, niche parties—such as ethnic parties—are not that different from their mainstream counterparts.

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