scholarly journals Negative Shocks and Political Parties’ Territorial Demands: The Institutional Roots of Party Competition

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesc Amat ◽  
Toni Rodon

Why do political parties set an extreme or a more moderate position on the territorial dimension? Despite previous works have paid recent interest on the dynamics of the political competition on the territorial dimension, we know much less about the factors that lead to a centrifugal or a centripetal party competition on the same dimension. In this article, we offer a new way of understanding it: we argue that parties’ policy position on the decentralization continuum not only depends on the level of territorial decentralization, but also on the credibility of the institutional agreement established through the country’s constitutional rigidity. If the original territorial pact does not guarantee that the majority group will have its “hands tied” so that it does not reverse the territorial agreement, political parties will have incentives to adopt more extreme positions on the territorial dimension. We test this argument with a dataset covering around 460 political parties clustered in 28 European countries from 1999 to 2019 and by exploiting the fact that the 2008 economic crisis unleashed a shock on the territorial design. Our results confirm our expectations. We show that both the federal deal and the credibility of the institutional arrangement through constitutional rigidity are necessary conditions to appease parties’ demands on the territorial dimension. Our results have important implications for our understanding of how institutions shape political competition along the territorial dimension.

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Andreadis ◽  
Heiko Giebler

AbstractLocating political parties correctly regarding different policy issues is not just crucial for research on parties, party competition, and many similar fields but also for the electorate. For the latter, it has become more and more important as the relevance of voting advice applications (VAA) has increased and as their main usage is to compare citizens’ policy preferences to the offer of political parties. However, if party positions are not adequately assigned, citizens are provided with suboptimal information which decreases the citizens’ capacities to make rational electoral decision. VAA designers follow different approaches to determining party positions. In this paper, we look beyond most common sources like electoral manifestos and expert judgments by using surveys of electoral candidates to validate and improve VAAs. We argue that by using positions derived from candidate surveys we get the information by the source itself, but at the same time we overcome most of the disadvantages of the other methods. Using data for the 2014 European Parliament election both in Greece and Germany, we show that while positions taken from the VAAs and from the candidate surveys do match more often than not, we also find substantive differences and even opposing positions. Moreover, these occasional differences have already rather severe consequences looking at calculated overlaps between citizens and parties as well as representations of the political competition space and party system polarization. These differences seem to be more pronounced in Greece. We conclude that candidate surveys are indeed a valid additional source to validate and improve VAAs.


Author(s):  
Bumke Christian ◽  
Voßkuhle Andreas

This chapter considers the relevant provisions of Art. 21 of the Grundgesetz (GG) with regard to political parties. Art. 21 GG does not define the term ‘political party’ and provides only a description of its function, which is ‘to participate in the formation of the political will of the people’. There are two conceptions of political party in the literature: the model of the ‘party state’ and the model of ‘party competition’. Political parties display the elements described in both models. The chapter first examines the Federal Constitutional Court's jurisprudence concerning the definition of ‘party’ before discussing the constitutional freedom to found and organise parties, prohibition of parties, competition between political parties and equality of opportunity among parties, and party financing (private financing and state financing).


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Neundorf ◽  
James Adams

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience – that is, debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey data from Germany and Great Britain, this study analyzes the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and concludes that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associative issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the German Greens.


2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-766 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S. Katz ◽  
Peter Mair

We restate and clarify the idea of the “cartel party,” a concept that has found considerable traction in studies of parties throughout the democratic world, including those far from the original research site and data on which the cartel model was based. The cartel party thesis holds that political parties increasingly function like cartels, employing the resources of the state to limit political competition and ensure their own electoral success. The thesis has been subject to varied empirical testing and to substantial theoretical evaluation and criticism. Against this background, we look again at the cartel party thesis in order to clarify ambiguities in and misinterpretations of the original argument. We also suggest further refinements, specifications and extensions of the argument. Following a background review of the original thesis, we break it down into its core components, and then clarify the terms in which it makes sense to speak of cartelization and collusion. We then go on to explore some of the implications of the thesis for our understanding of contemporary democracies and patterns of party organization and party competition and we identify a possible agenda for future research in party scholarship.


2007 ◽  
Vol 362 (1485) ◽  
pp. 1711-1721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laver ◽  
Michel Schilperoord

Two important human action selection processes are the choice by citizens of parties to support in elections and the choice by party leaders of policy ‘packages’ offered to citizens in order to attract this support. Having reviewed approaches analysing these choices and the reasons for doing this using the methodology of agent-based modelling, we extend a recent agent-based model of party competition to treat the number and identity of political parties as an output of, rather than an input to, the process of party competition. Party birth is modelled as an endogenous change of agent type from citizen to party leader, which requires describing citizen dissatisfaction with the history of the system. Endogenous birth and death of parties transforms into a dynamic system even in an environment where all agents have otherwise non-responsive adaptive rules. A key parameter is the survival threshold, with lower thresholds leaving citizens on average less dissatisfied. Paradoxically, the adaptive rule most successful for party leaders in winning votes makes citizens on average less happy than under other policy-selection rules.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Montserrat Baras ◽  
Oscar Barberà ◽  
Astrid Barrio ◽  
Juan Rodríguez-Teruel

AbstractThis article explores how multi-dimensional competition party systems shape the intraparty opinion structure in political parties. The aim is to extend and test May’s law of ideological curvilinear disparity to multi-dimensional settings. The data are based on the case of Catalonia, a party system characterized by the relevant presence of non-state wide parties, where political competition is based on two main dimensions: the left right axis and the subjective national identity one. The paper shows that while the Catalan parties do fit with May’s law in the left-right axis, this is not the case in the national identity one. In addition, it further illustrates how the interaction between both axes affects party competition and internal opinion differences between leaders, activists and voters. The results attest the complexity of the intraparty opinion structures in multidimensional competition systems.


Author(s):  
Robert Ladrech

This chapter examines the ways in which the European Union and the political parties of member states interact and cause change. It considers various types of change, causal mechanisms, and the differences between parties and the EU in both older and newer member states. The chapter first provides an overview of the different partisan actors that operate in the multi-level system of domestic and EU politics before discussing the manner in which domestic political parties can be said to have ‘Europeanized’. It then shows how parties in older and newer member states differ and concludes with an assessment of the wider effects of Europeanization on domestic politics in general and party politics in particular. The chapter suggests that the EU’s influence, in both east and west, may be more significant in the long run in terms of its indirect impact on patterns of party competition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 750-761
Author(s):  
Reynold William ◽  
Nur Endah Retno Wuryandari

After reformation era, there is a very significant shift towards the political life in Indonesia. So politicians and political parties need to redesign competing strategies to win political competition. The purpose of this study is to find out whether the Personal Branding, Political Marketing, Politic of Identity and Social Media have an influence on the decision of the community's option. The unit of analysis which been studied was the individuals, they are the individuals who had taken part in the general election of the West Java election. There are 216 respondents with dissemination in 5 cities (Bekasi, Bandung, Tasikmalaya, Bogor, Depok) and 1 district (Garut). The result, Political Marketing and Politic of Identity have a positive and significant effect on the decision of the communities. Personal Branding and Social Media have a positive but not significant effect on the decision to vote.


2021 ◽  
pp. 52-72
Author(s):  
V. M. Polterovich

The article examines the crisis of modern Western democracy. It is noted that the important causes of the crisis are slowing down of economic growth and deepening inequality in developed countries. It is shown that inter-party competition inevitably generates a mechanism of degradation of moral norms in the political sphere and reduction of the political system efficiency. These processes have intensified dramatically as a result of the spread of the Internet. They contributed to the reduction of citizens’ participation in political life and at the same time to the ochlocratization of the political system. It is shown as well that a number of transformations taking place in the Western countries are aimed at improvement of interaction mechanisms between the state and society and contribute to overcoming the crisis. These include expanding the role of parliamentary committees, increasing the number of parties, largescale reforms of public sector governance basing on collaboration. In this context, the experience of e-platforms and the possibilities of institutional collaborative platforms are analyzed. The concept of collaborative democracy is proposed, based on the analysis of the trends studied. The mechanism for collaborative democracy should ensure greater choice and broader direct participation of citizens in decision-making, control the costs of political competition and maintain ethical standards, prevent ochlocratization and improve governance. Contours of this mechanism are outlined. It is based on the use of a proportional electoral system of a special type, a system of expert councils and collaborative platforms for public decision-making, as well as on the implementation of decision-making rules close to consensus. The significance of these conclusions for Russia is discussed.


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