Diminished Parties

Many contemporary party organizations are failing to fulfill their representational role in contemporary democracies. While political scientists tend to rely on a minimalist definition of political parties (groups of candidates that compete in elections), this volume argues that this misses how parties can differ not only in degree but also in kind. With a new typology of political parties, the authors provide a new analytical tool to address the role of political parties in democratic functioning and political representation. The empirical chapters apply the conceptual framework to analyze seventeen parties across Latin America. The authors are established scholars expert in comparative politics and in the cases included in the volume. The book sets an agenda for future research on parties and representation, and it will appeal to those concerned with the challenges of consolidating stable and programmatic party systems in developing democracies.

Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics

Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex and problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, the role that the subnational political context plays in solving these coordination problems has largely been neglected in the comparative literature. This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics. We exploit the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications of the theory with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the importance of subnational political structures in supporting electoral authoritarian regimes.

Redistribution, power sharing and inequality concern

We analyze a political competition model of redistributive policies. We provide an equilibrium existence result and a full characterization of the net transfers to the different income groups. We also derive several testable predictions about the way in which the net group transfers and the after-tax Gini coefficient vary with the main parameters of the model. In accordance with the theory, the empirical evidence from a sample of developed and developing democracies supports a highly statistically significant association between: (i) the net group transfer and the gap between the population and the group mean initial income, and (ii) the net group transfer (and resp., the Gini coefficient) and power sharing disproportionality. In addition, the data also provide some empirical evidence confirming a significant relationship between the net transfers to the poor (and resp., the Gini) and the concern of the political parties with income inequality.

State-business Relations and Industrial Upgrading in the Digital Era: The Cases of Software and Aerospace Sectors in Mexico (2000–2012)

Developing countries face the daunting challenge of stimulating innovation-intensive sectors to increase their participation in the knowledge economy. In this context, two pressing questions arise: What types of state-business relations foster the adoption of industrial upgrading policies? And, what are the mechanisms through which some state-business relations configurations shape the likelihood of policy adoption under more democratic and open conditions? Bridging developmental state and business politics literature, this paper presents a novel framework that posits that the levels of bureaucratic quality and business cohesion generate diverse industrial upgrading policymaking patterns, and thus outcomes. An in-depth case study of the software sector and a cross-case comparison of the aerospace sector in Mexico during the 2000s illustrate and refine the framework. This article makes three main contributions. First, it expands extant political economy theories of industrial upgrading in developing democracies. Second, it improves our understanding of the private sector by carefully analyzing sectoral business cohesion. And third, the paper specifies the mechanisms through which bureaucrats and firms in democratic developing countries collaborate to enact programs that spur high-tech industries in the twenty-first century.

Presidential Tenure and Constitutional Provisions: Recent Evidence from Central Africa

Constitutions around Africa have been repeatedly tested on the issue of presidential term limits. We explore the four most recent cases of African presidents facing the end of their constitutionally mandated limit, all of which developed in Central Africa. Burundi, Rwanda, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all adopted constitutions limiting presidential tenure to two terms; yet, in 2015, when these limits were approaching, none of the sitting presidents simply stood down. Our analysis focuses on the constitutional provisions meant to protect the two-term limit, the strategies employed by each of the four presidents, and the difficulty they faced in pursuing extended tenure. We find that constitutional provisions do constrain, but not always to the expected degree. Our analysis adds a consideration of a foundational constitutional factor to the growing literature on term limits in Africa, with implications for other regions of newly developing democracies.

Biometric Technologies, Electoral Fraud and the Management of Elections in Nigeria and Zimbabwe

The introduction of biometric technologies (BT) in Africa’s developing democracies has raised concerns on the BT effect on voter turnout and voter confidence. Questions have also been raised about BT effectiveness as an anti-rigging and anti-fraud solution that would ensure credible elections. Through secondary and survey data, the study used Nigeria and Zimbabwe in Africa as units of analysis, as both countries have similar historical trajectory and conditions like weak institutions, reliance on international donors and the use of BT. The study discovered that at the pre-election stage, BT use enhanced election credibility as evidenced in computerized voter register and Smart Card Readers (SCR). It also discovered that at the election stage, biometric technologies served as an effective anti-rigging measure by eliminating cases of unregistered voting, ballot stuffing and multiple voting. The study further shows that the application of biometric technologies affects voters’ confidence and turn out negatively. For instance, the more biometric technologies (BM) are deployed and used in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the modest the level of voters’ turnout (43.65% in 2015 elections and 52% 2000 elections respectively), showing the limitations of BT in resolving issues of voters’ confidence, turnout and electoral fraud in Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

States, Religion, and Democracy in Southeast Asia: Comparative Religious Regime Formation

This chapter seeks to account for the political origins of “religious regimes”—institutional relations between political authority (a secular state) and clerical authority (organized religion)—through a comparative historical analysis of three Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. Despite relatively similar historical, geopolitical, and sociocultural conditions—and against their original intentions—these three nations have established distinctive types of religious regimes since independence: secular-dominant (Indonesia), established-religion (Malaysia), and religious monarchy (Brunei). The chapter argues that the varying pathways adopted by these three nations are the result of state formation, specifically the ways in which secular political elites pursued and consolidated their state powers and domination during post-independence institution-building. Moreover, the chapter’s comparative analysis suggests that the type of—and timing of—religious regime formation is essential to account for the ability and willingness of late-developing democracies such as Indonesia and Malaysia to protect basic civil rights and freedom of religious (and nonreligious) communities and people. In contrast to Christian-dominant Europe, where mostly secular regimes were formed concomitantly to facilitate democratic transition and consolidation, late-developing Muslim democracies have seen the consolidation of religious regimes prior to the formation of modern state and popular democratic movements and consolidation. As a result, late-developing Muslim democracies have tended to see more aggressive religious authorities contesting and complicating the trajectories of democratic consolidation.