Shaping Multi-Level Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lori Thorlakson
Keyword(s):  
Political Competition ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Causal Process ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Electoral Behaviour ◽  
Multi Level

Why, in some multi-level systems, does political competition preserve highly independent spheres of political life across the units and levels of a federation, while in other multi-level systems, political competition results in the emergence of a shared political space? This chapter argues that these patterns of independent or integrated politics in multi-level systems are shaped in important ways by the federal institutional structure, which shapes the incentives that parties and voters alike face. Surveying the literature that identifies how institutions impact party organization, party systems, and electoral behaviour, this chapter sets out a two-stage causal process whereby institutions shape aspects of integrated politics and aspects of integrated politics reinforce each other.

Integrated and Independent Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
Lori Thorlakson
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Party Organizations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Shared Space ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Integrated Or

Political life in a multi-level system can be integrated or independent at the level of party organizations, party systems, and voter behaviour, either creating a shared space of political competition or separate political worlds. This chapter elaborates the concepts of integrated and independent politics in multi-level systems and discusses their possible normative consequences for the performance of federalism. The chapter presents an operationalization of the core concepts of integrated and independent politics and discusses how aspects of multi-level competition, at the level of party, party system, and voter behaviour, either generate integrative forces or preserve separate arenas of competition.

Multi-Level Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Thorlakson
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Design ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Fiscal Decentralization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Subnational Elections ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Original Survey ◽  
Integrated Or

All federal systems face an internal tension between divisive and integrative political forces, striking a balance between providing local autonomy and representation on one hand and maintaining an integrated political community on the other hand. How multi-level systems strike this balance depends on the development of styles of either integrated politics, which creates a shared framework for political competition across the units of a federation, or independent politics, preserving highly autonomous arenas of political life. This book argues that the long-term development of integrated or independent styles of politics in multi-level systems can be shaped by two key elements of federal institutional design: the degree of fiscal decentralization, or how much is ‘at stake’ at each level of government, and the degree to which the allocation of policy jurisdiction creates legislative or administrative interdependence or autonomy. These elements of federal institutional design shape integrated and independent politics at the level of party organizations, party systems, and voter behaviour. This book tests these arguments using a mixed-method approach, drawing on original survey data from 250 subnational party leaders and aggregate electoral data from over 2,200 subnational elections in seven multi-level systems: Canada, the United States, Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. It supplements this with configurational analysis and qualitative case studies.

Elections and the Democratic Class Struggle

1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Typical Form ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
The Right

It is commonly believed that elections in the industrial democracies reflect a democratic class struggle, according to which lower-income voters support parties of the Left while higher-income voters protect their interest by voting for parties of the Right. This interpretation hinges critically on a series of implicit assumptions. First, the class-struggle thesis assumes that most industrial democracies have majoritarian political institutions. Second, it assumes that the typical form of political competition follows the responsible-parties model, which implies, among other things, that parties are fundamentally programmatic, adopting distinctive positions along a left-right continuum. When these assumptions are evaluated in light of the available evidence on the nature of party systems, political competition, and voting behavior, they are judged to be largely implausible. Thus, the democratic-class-struggle thesis constitutes a seriously flawed interpretation of elections.

Context and Research Design

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-73
Author(s):  
Isabela Mares ◽  
Lauren E. Young
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Mixed Methods Research ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Study Behavior ◽  
Descriptive Information ◽  
Communist Countries

This study examines clientelistic politics in two post-communist countries, Hungary and Romania. Chapter 3 presents descriptive information on the recent evolution of party systems in both countries and the changes in patterns of political competition in recent elections. It examines the most significant policies that provide opportunities for clientelistic manipulation of state resources. In both countries, the main social policy programs that can be subjected to political manipulation are workfare programs. The chapter discusses the main political considerations leading to the adoption of workfare programs characterized by high discretion of mayors over the allocation of policy benefits. It also describes how a mixed methods research design was crafted to study behavior that candidates, brokers, and voters often prefer to hide.

What’s New? How to Refine our Assessments of Party Novelty

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-66
Author(s):  
Tim Haughton ◽  
Kevin Deegan-Krause
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Multi Level

Scholars have disagreed over how to assess and measure what constitutes a ‘new’ political party. The different understandings of newness matter because they are used in attempts to measure the overall instability of party systems, often producing widely varying results for volatility calculations. There are multiple approaches to assessing novelty. Some are rooted in studying party origins, while others are based on party attributes, and there is a wide range of views on the thresholds for what counts as new. Combining the origin and attribute approaches provides the best way of understanding the degree of change. The chapter assesses parties on a multi-level range of change from ‘Continuation’ through to ‘Inception’. This range permits both stricter and looser definitions to be used to determine the level and extent of newness in a political system, and thus works around the problem of inconsistent evaluations of parties and conflicting methods of classification.

A Review of Public Issue Salience: Concepts, Determinants and Effects on Voting

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Dennison
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Public Issue ◽  
Electoral Behaviour ◽  
Advanced Democracies

In this article, I offer a review of the uses and findings regarding public issue salience in the political science literature, with a focus on electoral behaviour. I argue that in spite of the increased use of issue salience in recent years, with impressive explanatory results, the concept of issue salience remains underspecified and, at times, contradictory and that its antecedents remain relatively unknown. This is likely to have led to serious shortcomings when attempting to explain recent changes to party systems and electoral results in advanced democracies.

Party System Nationalization and the Provision of Public Health Services

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Hicken ◽  
Ken Kollman ◽  
Joel W. Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
National Level ◽  
Health Indicators ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Public Health Services ◽  
Public Benefits ◽  
Immunization Rates ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Using Data

In this paper, we examine consequences of party system nationalization. We argue that the degree to which party systems are nationalized should affect the provision of public benefits by governments. When political competition at the national level occurs between parties that represent specific sub-national constituencies, then the outcomes of policy debates and conflicts can lead to an undersupply of nationally focused public services. We test our argument using data on DPT and measles immunization rates for 58 countries. We find that low party system nationalization is a barrier to improvements in these health indicators. Specifically, a substantial presence of regionalized parties hinders states’ convergence toward international heath standards.

Politicization of ethnicity in party manifestos

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleh Protsyk ◽  
Stela Garaz
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Party Manifestos ◽  
Party Positions

In this article we present a content analysis framework for textual analysis of programmatic documents with the goal of identifying party positions on the ethnic dimension of political competition. The proposed approach allows for evaluation and comparison of how party systems in multi-ethnic states process ethno-cultural claims and demands. Our method of content analysis of party programmatic texts provides adequate granularity by which to capture the subtleties of ethno-cultural political rhetoric. It also addresses some of the misclassification and measurement problems raised in the literature with respect to the dominant Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) approach to textual analysis. We demonstrate how estimates generated by our method for human-based coding constitute an improvement on the CMP’s estimates of party positions on ethno-cultural issues.

The Art of Political Science: Spatial Diagrams as Iconic and Revelatory

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry E. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Voting Systems ◽  
Demand Curves ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Better Than

Spatial diagrams of politics could and should be iconic for political science in much the same way as supply-and-demand curves are in economics. Many fundamental problems of political science can be connected with them, and many different concepts—such as ideological constraint, cross-pressures, framing, agenda-setting, political competition, voting systems, and party systems, to name just a few—can be illuminated through spatial diagrams. Spatial diagrams raise questions and provide insights. They suggest political maneuvers, possible realignments, and political problems. They provide us with revealing images that aid memory and facilitate analysis. They are a powerful way to think about politics, and we could not do better than to feature them in our textbooks, to use them in our research, and to exhibit them as our brand—as our distinctive way of thinking about how the world works

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