scholarly journals The Quantity and the Quality of Party Systems

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (7) ◽  
pp. 899-920 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Developing Democracies ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
Ideological Voting

Previous research claims that the number of parties affects the representation of social cleavages in voting behavior, election turnout, patterns of political conflict, and other party system effects. This article argues that research typically counts the quantity of parties and that often the more important property is the quality of party competition—the polarization of political parties within a party system. The author first discusses why polarization is important to study. Second, the author provides a new measurement of party system polarization based on voter perceptions of party positions in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which includes more than 50 separate elections from established and developing democracies. Third, the author compares party polarization and party fractionalization as influences on cleavage-based and ideological voting and as predictors of turnout levels. The finding is that party polarization is empirically more important in explaining these outcomes.

The Patterns of Party Polarization in East Asia

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton ◽  
Aiji Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Party System ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Party Polarization ◽  
Party Choice ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
The Comparative Study

The alignment of parties within a party system shapes the nature of electoral competition, the process of representation, and potentially the legitimacy of the system. This article describes the distribution of parties and the levels of party polarization in the party systems of East Asian democracies. We examine the public's perceptions of party positions on a left-right scale to map the pattern of party competition. The evidence is based on two waves of surveys from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We describe considerable variation in the polarization of Asian party systems, which has direct implications for the clarity of party choice and the behavior of voters. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings.

scholarly journals Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence From Over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172092325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arndt Leininger ◽  
Maurits J Meijers
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Party System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
The Relationship

While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy.

Party Systems: Types, Dimensions, and Explanations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsolt Enyedi ◽  
Fernando Casal Bértoa
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Informal Institution ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
The Stability

The study of political parties and party systems is intimately linked to the development of modern political science. The configuration of party competition varies across time and across polities. In order to capture this variance, one needs to go beyond the analysis of individual parties and to focus on their numbers (i.e. fragmentation), their interactions (i.e. closure), the prevailing ideological patterns (i.e. polarization), and the stability of the balance of power (i.e. volatility) in all spheres of competition, including the electoral, parliamentary, and governmental arenas. Together, these factors constitute the core informal institution of modern politics: a party system. The relevant scholarship relates the stability of party systems to the degree of the institutionalization of individual parties, to various institutional factors such as electoral systems, to sociologically anchored structures such as cleavages, to economic characteristics of the polity (primarily growth), to historical legacies (for example, the type of dictatorship that preceded competitive politics) and to the length of democratic experience and to the characteristics of the time when democracy was established. The predictability of party relations has been found to influence both the stability of governments and the quality of democracy. However, still a lot is to be learned about party systems in Africa or Asia, the pre-WWII era or in regional and/or local contexts. Similarly, more research is needed regarding the role of colonialism or how party system stability affects policy-making. As far as temporal change is concerned, we are witnessing a trend towards the destabilization of party systems, but the different indicators show different dynamics. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that party systems are complex, multifaceted phenomena.

Electoral and Party Systems

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-78
Author(s):  
André Blais ◽  
Shaun Bowler ◽  
Bernard Grofman
Keyword(s):  
Voter Turnout ◽  
Party System ◽  
National Level ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Electoral Laws ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
The U.S

Electoral laws are often regarded as the key factors structuring party competition. Yet, despite having very similar electoral systems, reflecting a shared colonial legacy, the United States (U.S.) and Canada have had very different party systems. For the past 100 years, the U.S. is perhaps the most consistently two-party system among the world’s major democracies, but during this same period Canada has experienced considerable variation in the number of parties represented in Parliament at the national level. This chapter addresses both the causes and consequences of this puzzling divergence in party systems in the two countries. We also compare a number of other features of the two nation’s electoral institutions, including campaign finance rules, rules for constituency boundary drawing, bicameralism, and the mechanism for the selection of the executive, with particular attention to the U.S. Electoral College and its alleged link with two-partyism. We also examine the policy consequences of the divergence in party systems and look at the way in which party competition in the two countries may affect voter turnout.

scholarly journals Institutionalization of the Czech and Slovenian party system

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-265
Author(s):  
Alena Klvaňová
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
System Stability ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Scene

Abstract For the past two decades, the characteristic feature of the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovenia’s party system has been relatively invariable and closed to fundamental change. In both cases, there has been a distortion of the change and its nature which occurred around 2010, when new political entities began to emerge on the political scene. These entities have received support from a large part of the electorate. The reason for the success of the new political parties is mainly related to the dissatisfaction of the Czech and Slovenian public with the political situation and the conviction of citizens about the widespread corruption among public officials. The success of the newly formed entities caused the decline of primarily established parties. The aim of this article is to determine the effect of these changes on the party systems, and simultaneously to answer the question, to what extent both party systems are institutionalized. The answer to this question can be obtained by measuring the extend of institutionalization of party systems based on three criteria, which are incorporation of political parties in the party system, party system stability and quality of party competition.

The West German Electorate and the Party System: Continuity and Change in the 1980s

1988 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Conradt ◽  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Party System ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
German Politics ◽  
Electoral Strategies ◽  
Mass Publics ◽  
Transitional Phase

Changes in voting behavior and the party system in the three federal elections since 1980 indicate that West German politics have entered a new transitional phase. The periods of CDU hegemony, 1949–1969, and two party competition, 1972–1980, have passed. Both major parties have lost support, turnout has declined, ticket-splitting has increased and New Politics issues such as the environment, disarmament and civil liberties have become salient to increasing numbers of voters. The influence of social class, religion and regional ties on voting behavior has declined. Electoral behavior has become more volatile and uncertain. Four major sources of these changes are identified: the postwar transformation of German social structure; the changing value priorities of mass publics; the introduction of new issues; and the electoral strategies of the parties as determined by their elites and leaders. The study concludes with a discussion of the future of the party system and the prospects for a major dealignment or realignment in West German politics.

Nationalism and political competition in Central Europe: The case of Poland

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Vermeersch
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Public Concern ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Constant Flux ◽  
The Creation

To explain nationalist politics in Poland, researchers and observers have sometimes speculated about the dispositions of the electorate, popular sentiments, public fears for the loss of sovereignty, the people's historically ingrained preference for nationalist rhetoric, and their feelings of discontent about the economy. This article argues that hypotheses about the existence of nationalist sentiments within the electorate have tended to eclipse an important question about the main producers of nationalist rhetoric: Why do certain mainstream parties at certain points in time decide to frame their program as nationalist, even when there is no objective reality that seems conducive to the creation of great public concern about typically nationalist issues? This article explores this question by looking at various campaigns for Polish parliamentary elections since 1997. My argument is that when seeking to explain the motivations behind major campaign turns toward nationalism we should not merely understand them as responses to voter sentiment and voting behavior. Instead, we should see them as crucially driven by the transactional logic of inter-party competition in a party system that is in constant flux.

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.

The Rise of Caste Politics: Party System Change and Voter Realignment, 1962–2004

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVER HEATH ◽  
YOGENDRA YADAV
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Party System ◽  
System Change ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Cleavage ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cleavage Structure

This chapter explores the relationship formed between the social structure of India and its contemporary patterns. It tries to show how this relates to the theories of social cleavage alignment, and examines change in the cleavage structure of party competition. The chapter also discusses how different contemporary patterns of political conflict in India are from those of the past.

The Spatial Structure of Party Competition: Party Dispersion within a Finite Policy Space

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 805-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine T. Andrews ◽  
Jeannette Money
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Policy Space ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Issue Space

Using the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data for twenty established parliamentary democracies, the authors have studied the relationship between number of parties in a party system and party dispersion. They found that as the number of parties in the system increases, the dispersion of parties also increases, but only up to a point. The boundaries of a finite issue space appear to expand up to at most five parties. In addition, once the number of parties in the party system was controlled for, they found that electoral rules have no direct effect on party dispersion. Thus, their findings validate the theoretical predictions of spatial theory while at the same time highlighting surprising ways in which the policy space is constrained.

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