scholarly journals Responsiveness when parties are “weak”: A candidate-based analysis of voter-party congruence in Europe

2020 ◽  
pp. 135406882096809
Author(s):  
Andrea Pedrazzani ◽  
Paolo Segatti
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Mass Survey ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ideological Polarization ◽  
Personalization Of Politics

Outside the US, the crucial question of how well politicians represent the preferences of voters is usually investigated at the party level. Reversing this perspective, we examine representation in Europe from the point of view of individual candidates running in national parliamentary elections. This is especially insightful in a period that seems characterized by a decline in parties’ representational capacities and an increasing personalization of politics. We analyze representation by considering the incongruence between candidates’ left–right positions and the average placement of their party voters. By combining candidate survey data with mass survey data on voters, we assess how ideological incongruence varies according to predictors measured at the levels of candidates, parties, and party systems. The results highlight a systematic association between a partisan style of representation and candidates’ proximity to voters, as well as the interactions between representational roles and factors such as the anti-establishment nature of parties and ideological polarization in the party system.

The Electoral System, the Party System and Accountability in Parliamentary Government

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER KAM ◽  
ANTHONY M. BERTELLI ◽  
ALEXANDER HELD
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Party System ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Electoral Reform ◽  
Electoral Accountability ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Government

Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government’s policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party system’s bipolarity, for example, with parties arrayed in two distinct blocs. Proportional electoral systems achieve accountability as well as majoritarian ones when bipolarity is strong but not when it is weak. This is because bipolarity decreases the number of connected coalitions that incumbent parties can join to preserve their policy-making power. Our results underscore the limitations that party systems place on electoral reform and the benefits that bipolarity offers for clarifying voters’ choices and intensifying electoral competition.

scholarly journals Active and passive: two ways party systems influence electoral outcomes

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-467
Author(s):  
Miroslav Nemčok
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Set Size ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Ideological Polarization ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Choice Set

AbstractParties can not only actively adjust the electoral rules to reach more favourable outcomes, as is most often recognized in political science, but they also passively create an environment that systematically influences electoral competition. This link is theorized and included in the wider framework capturing the mutual dependence of electoral systems and party systems. The impact of passive influence is successfully tested on one out of two factors closely related to party systems: choice set size (i.e., number of options provided to voters) and degree of ideological polarization. The research utilizes established datasets (i.e., Constituency-Level Elections Archive, Party System Polarization Index, Chapel Hill Expert Survey, and Manifesto Project Database) and via regression analysis with clustered robust standard errors concludes that the choice set size constitutes an attribute with passive influence over electoral systems. Thus, it must be reflected when outcomes of electoral systems are estimated or compared across various contexts.

Parties and Party Systems

2020 ◽  
pp. 330-348
Author(s):  
Mónica Méndez Lago
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Ideological Polarization ◽  
Incumbent Party ◽  
Key Questions

Using the most relevant indicators highlighted by the literature on party systems, such as the indexes of volatility, fragmentation, and ideological polarization in the electoral–parliamentary arena, this chapter analyses the development of the Spanish party system since the transition to democracy. It focuses on the different stages of its development, marked by the two main transformations it has experienced: the first in the 1982 elections with the collapse of the incumbent party, and, after a long phase of stability, the second transformation in 2014/15 with the emergence of two new national parties onto the electoral and parliamentary arena. One of the key questions the chapter addresses is why a party system that had remained quite stable for more than three decades since 1982, preventing newcomers from coming in, finally gave way to a transformation in the mid-2010s.

scholarly journals Comparison of agrarian political  parties in selected Central European states after 1989

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 (No. 12) ◽  
pp. 544-553
Author(s):  
P. Blažek ◽  
M. Kubalek
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Agriculture Modernization ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
The City

This study deals with the founding and development of agrarian political parties and movements in selected postcommunist states (with the emphasis put on the Czech party system in the early 1990‘s). The topic is discussed from the point of view of classic political science theories, namely the historical conflict approach of Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset, complemented with Derek Urwin’s theory regarding emergence of agrarian parties as a means of defense of country against urbanization. The results of research into the urban – rural cleavage and its influence on the genesis of agrarian political parties in selected post-communist countries after 1989 seem to support the above mentioned theories (even though those were originally formulated for a much earlier period when the Western party systems were first coming into existence. These can be applied also to the Czech environment, where several profession-based political parties were established in the early 1990’s, some of which were concerned with the defense of peasants’ and farmers’ interests. The attempts to create profession-based parties in the Czech political system were destined to fail for several reasons. The first was a striking ideological profiling of the bipolar party spectrum, causing general parties to pick up the themes and voters concerned with economic recession, and radicalization of electorate. The second reason lied in the diminishing numbers of potential voters, a result of agriculture modernization and general urbanization of society, which caused that the city-country conflict was reflected in the election results only marginally. The result was similar to other post-Soviet states, with a specific exception of Poland: agrarian parties and movements lost their former influence.

Плинність партійних систему посткомуністичних країнах (1992−2019)

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Witalij Lebediuk
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Baltic Countries ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Communist Countries

The paper offers a thorough analysis of the main types of party systems and their changes in the post-Soviet countries between 1992 and 2019. The evolution of the main criteria concerning the party systems classification has been analyzed. We use a database of all parliamentary elections which took place in the post-communist countries since 1992. This article concludes that the majority of party systems of the post-Soviet countries are not stable and suffering permanent changes. On this basis, 16 party systems that continue to exist in the post-communist countries from 1992 to 2019 are almost half-assigned to the predominant party types. Our findings indicate that Kyrgyzstan and Moldova have moved from a predominant party type to a multiparty type. Russia, Armenia, and Ukraine have changed their party systems from a multiparty type to a predominant party type. Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan remain in the predominant party system since the first elections. Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the Baltic countries have remained in the multiparty types since the first elections.

Bipartisanship as Possible Alternative of Russian Political System Evolution

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 256-265
Author(s):  
Konstantin V. Simonov ◽  
Stanislav P. Mitrakhovich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political System ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Practical Advice ◽  
Simultaneous Separation

The article examines the possibility of transfer to bipartisan system in Russia. The authors assess the benefits of the two-party system that include first of all the ensuring of actual political competition and authority alternativeness with simultaneous separation of minute non-system forces that may contribute to the country destabilization. The authors analyze the accompanying risks and show that the concept of the two-party system as the catalyst of elite schism is mostly exaggerated. The authors pay separate attention to the experience of bipartisan system implementation in other countries, including the United States. They offer detailed analysis of the generated concept of the bipartisanship crisis and show that this point of view doesn’t quite agree with the current political practice. The authors also examine the foreign experience of the single-party system. They show that the success of the said system is mostly insubstantial, besides many of such systems have altered into more complex structures, while commentators very often use not the actual information but the established myths about this or that country. The authors also offer practical advice regarding the potential technologies of transition to the bipartisan system in Russia.

Federal and Subnational Elections in Russia: Coherence and Divergence in Electoral Outcomes

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-353
Author(s):  
Rostislav Turovsky ◽  
Marina Sukhova
Keyword(s):  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Regional Parties ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Electoral Authoritarianism ◽  
Subnational Elections ◽  
Effective Number Of Parties ◽  
Number Of Parties ◽  
Regional Elections

Abstract This article examines the differences between Russian voting at federal elections and regional legislature elections, both combined and conducted independently. The authors analyse these differences, their character and their dynamics as an important characteristic of the nationalisation of the party system. They also test hypotheses about a higher level of oppositional voting and competitiveness in subnational elections, in accordance with the theory of second-order elections, as well as the strategic nature of voting at federal elections, by contrast with expressive voting during subnational campaigns. The empirical study is based on calculating the differences in votes for leading Russian parties at subnational elections and at federal elections (simultaneous, preceding and following) from 2003, when mandatory voting on party lists was widespread among the regions, to 2019. The level of competitiveness is measured in a similar way, by calculating the effective number of parties. The study indicates a low level of autonomy of regional party systems, in many ways caused by the fact that the law made it impossible to create regional parties, and then also by the 2005 ban on creation of regional blocs. The strong connection between federal and regional elections in Russia clearly underlines the fluid and asynchronic nature of its electoral dynamics, where subnational elections typically predetermine the results of the following federal campaigns. At the same time, the formal success of the nationalisation of the party system, achieved by increasing the homogeneity of voting at the 2016 and 2018 federal elections, is not reflected by the opposing process of desynchronisation between federal and regional elections after Putin’s third-term election. There is also a clear rise in the scale of the differences between the two. At the same time, the study demonstrates the potential presence in Russia of features common to subnational elections in many countries: their greater support for the opposition and presence of affective voting. However, there is a clear exception to this trend during the period of maximum mobilisation of the loyal electorate at the subnational elections immediately following the accession of Crimea in 2014–2015, and such tendencies are generally restrained by the conditions of electoral authoritarianism.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Research ◽  
Party System ◽  
Institutional Reform ◽  
System Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Institutional Reforms

This final chapter draws out the two main conclusions from the book. First, it discusses the policy implications of its findings. It suggests caution in the decentralization of political authority as a remedy for democratic underperformance in patronage-based democracies. Rather than making government more accountable, it may instead exacerbate principal–agent conflicts between center and periphery. More important than decentralization in the short term may be institutional reforms at the center that make parties more programmatic and responsive to citizens. Second, it sets out some of the implications of the book’s findings for the study of populism and party-system change more generally. It shows that the varied ways in which voters and parties are linked creates different pathways to the decline of establishment parties and the success of populist alternatives. Further comparative research across party systems might contribute positively to institutional reform and political change.

Rurality and Party System Fragmentation in the Nigerian Presidential Elections of the Fourth Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85
Author(s):  
Cletus Famous Nwankwo
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Voting Behaviour ◽  
Composite Measure ◽  
Singular Measures ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Fourth Republic ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Negative Effect

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of rurality on party system fragmentation in the Nigerian presidential elections of the fourth republic. The findings show that party system fragmentation (PSF) has been characteristically low in the Nigerian presidential elections and rurality does not significantly predict party system fragmentation. Rurality has a negative effect on PSF in all the elections studied except the 2003 election but only significant in the 2011 poll. Thus, the paper cast doubt on previous studies that indicate that striking rural-urban differences manifest in party system fragmentation in African elections and attribute it to previous studies’ measure of rurality. The paper argues that the use of a composite measure of rurality instead of singular measures of rurality might provide better analysis that helps us understand the effect of rurality on party systems. Also, it argues that in the study of the rural-urban difference in voting behaviour or political behaviours more broadly, data should be aggregated based on cities and non-city areas because cities have distinctive urban characters compared with non-city places. Analyses done on states or constituencies level may not reveal the rural-urban difference because states and constituencies usually have a mix of rural and urban population and other characteristics.

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