Race and Campaign Resources: Candidate Identification Numbers in Brazil

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

The Rise and Decline of Polish Revisionist Marxist Economics: The Fates of Włodzimierz Brus and the Faculty of Political Economy (University of Warsaw), 1953–1968

The paper deals with the history of Polish revisionist Marxist political economy, which flourished between 1956 and 1968, mostly in the academic institutions of Warsaw. The fate of Polish revisionism in Marxist economics is presented in parallel to the intellectual biography of Włodzimierz Brus (one of its leaders) and the fate of the Faculty of Political Economy ( Wydział Ekonomii Politycznej [WEP]), which he co-established at the University of Warsaw. The authors compare contemporary documents and existing analyses of the period with memories of Brus’s colleagues and students, collected decades after the events. The authors show that both the relative freedom of expression and academic research and the process of gradual closing of these possibilities were related to the changing balance of power within Party elites.

Norway

In this chapter, we describe the institutional setting of parliamentary debate in Stortinget and identify correlates of speech participation, drawing on a dataset of more than a quarter of a million speeches from 1998 to 2016. The key correlate of speech participation is committee membership in the committee responsible for preparing the report for the topic under discussion. However, that is not the whole story. Party elites speak more than backbenchers. As speaking time is allocated proportional to party size, MPs from the smaller parties speak more often than their counterparts in the larger parties. While we uncover a gender difference in the overall allocation of speeches, this is only present amongst parties on the right of the political spectrum. We do not find a similar difference in length of speech or allocation of speeches amongst members within the same committee. Hence, we ascribe the gender difference in speeches to gender differences in committee composition.

A Rigged Game? How Candidate, Partisan, and Electoral Factors Shape Elite Support for the Party Nomination Process

The 2016 presidential nominations revealed deep, yet distinct, divisions within each major party. These divisions persisted and permeated the general election campaign and were reflected in voters’ dissatisfaction with the candidates. Movements such as the “Bernie or Bust” supporters and the “Never-Trumpers” indicated that vocal portions of the parties were dissatisfied with the party nominees or the processes that selected those candidates. There were also indications that many party elites were not pleased with the nomination processes or the outcome; yet, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the extent to which party elites support the nomination process and their party’s nominee and what explains this support. By combining the 2016 Convention Delegate Study and an original dataset of the nomination electoral rules utilized by the states, we assess how candidate, partisan, and electoral factors shape delegate support for the nomination process and nominee. Our analysis reveals that candidate and party-centric explanations better explain delegate views toward the nomination process and nominee than factors related to the electoral context.

Party Primaries and Women’s Representation in Ghana

Chapter 3 asks how women fare during candidate selection within institutionalized parties. The chapter provides a unique analysis of the persistent barriers women are likely to face as aspirants in countries that lack legislative gender-based quotas. Focusing on Ghana’s two national parties, the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party, Bauer and Darkwah examine how the adoption of seemingly more inclusive and transparent primary processes affects women’s likelihood of being selected as party candidates. Drawing on qualitative interviews with party elites, women aspirants, and candidates, they find that women in Ghana report serious concerns with potential violence and harassment. In addition, they show that financial constraints pose a barrier for women aspirants and that party efforts to overcome these constraints through fee reductions and subsidies are largely insufficient.

Partisanship in the #MeToo Era

Partisanship structures mass politics by shaping the votes, policy views, and political perceptions of ordinary people. Even so, substantial shifts in partisanship can occur when elites signal clear differences on a political issue and attentive citizens update their views of party reputations. Mismatched partisans who strongly care about the issue respond by changing parties in a process of “issue evolution” when writ large. Others simply update their views to match their party in a “conflict extension” process. We build on these models by integrating the largely separate research strands of party issue ownership. Using sexual misconduct as a critical case study, we argue that partisan change can occur rapidly when party elites move strategically to take ownership of an issue, thereby clarifying differences between the parties. Using a quasi-experiment, a survey experiment, and data from dozens of national surveys, we find recent, rapid shifts in party reputations on #MeToo, views of the issue, party votes, and broader party support.

Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans’ COVID-19 vaccination intentions and attitudes. In a preregistered survey experiment (n = 1,480), we varied whether self-identified Republicans saw endorsements of the vaccine from prominent Republicans (including video of a speech by former President Donald Trump), from the Democratic Party (including video of a speech by President Joseph Biden), or a neutral control condition including no endorsements. Unvaccinated Republicans who were exposed to the Republican elite endorsement reported 7.0% higher vaccination intentions than those who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement and 5.7% higher than those in the neutral control condition. These effects were statistically mediated by participants’ reports of how much they thought Republican politicians would want them to get vaccinated. We also found evidence of backlash effects against Democratic elites: Republicans who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement reported they would be significantly less likely to encourage others to vaccinate and had more negative attitudes toward the vaccine, compared with those who viewed the Republican elite endorsement or the neutral control. These results demonstrate the relative advantage of cues from Republican elites—and the risks of messaging from Democrats currently in power—for promoting vaccination among the largest vaccine-hesitant subgroup in the United States.

Elite clientelism in Nigeria: The role of parties in weakening legislator-voter ties

Political parties in Africa and other developing countries are known to forge clientelist rather than programmatic ties to voters. Yet this does not mean that parties reward strong legislator-voter ties. In this paper, I argue for the case of Nigeria that lawmakers seeking to advance their political careers are incentivized to direct public resources to party members and senior party elites rather than serve their constituents in general. I draw on interviews with 8th National Assembly (2015–2019) lawmakers as well as quantitative data on MP re-election, targeted bills and motions, and the use of constituency development funds to demonstrate the predominance of narrow clientelism in Nigeria. I also place the Nigerian case in comparative perspective to argue that the extent to which legislators devote attention to constituents is likely to exist on a continuum, with the causes and consequences of this variation requiring further attention from scholars.

Revamping the menu – or just offering what’s in stock? Candidate list volatility in open-list PR systems. Evidence from Finland

Why do parties change candidate lists between elections? Although candidate list volatility is an important indicator of the responsiveness of electoral representation, it has received little attention in research. We offer a critical case study of party list volatility in Finland, using a candidate-centred open-list proportional (PR) electoral system with ideal conditions for ‘ultra-strategic’ party behaviour. Our explorative two-stage research design begins with party elite interviews, to extract factors that can affect list volatility, which in the following step are tested in a regression analysis of 564 party lists in parliamentary elections 1983–2019. Our results show that list formation is a complex phenomenon, where demand and supply factors interact in a contingent fashion. Following trends of voter dealignment, personalization and ‘electoral-professionalization’ of parties, volatility has increased over time. Electoral defeats and declining party membership increase volatility, but a member-driven mass-party heritage that limits party elites’ strategic capacity has a stabilizing effect.

Postwar statebuilding in Burundi: ruling party elites and illiberal peace

The widespread enthusiasm for internationally-supported liberal statebuilding since the 1990s has become much more tempered, due in part to the mixed record of postwar liberal statebuilding. Over time, many postwar countries have adopted more authoritarian statebuilding trajectories, despite the fact that negotiated peace agreements tend to reflect liberal principles. This is often attributed to ‘liberal’ international actors encountering resistant ‘illiberal’ domestic elites. The postwar statebuilding trajectory in Burundi appears to fit this dominant narrative, with the ruling party, the Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie-Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD), deviating from some of the liberal principles that underpinned the Burundian peace agreement. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the internal politics of Burundi's ruling party, we show that this account is flawed. We question overly simplified accounts of ‘illiberal’ ruling party elites and we argue that tensions, competition and fragmentation within the ruling party were decisive in Burundi's statebuilding path. Rather than seeing Burundi as an inevitable failure of liberal statebuilding, we highlight how there was some commitment to liberal principles even within the ruling party. Internal struggles within the ruling CNDD-FDD led to current outcomes in Burundi, which should not be interpreted as predestined or definitive. We show that understanding the complexities, diversities and contingencies within ruling parties opens new spaces for thinking about the creation and recreation of political orders after war.