Parties and Party Systems

Since the late 1980s, South Korea has established democratic rules and institutions to protect the political freedom and civil rights of its citizens. In this process, political parties played a pivotal role in building democratic institutions and became a necessary actor for democratic governance. The characteristics of South Korean political parties and party system such as non-ideological regional factionalism, personality-based party organization, growing electoral volatility due to party changes, and a cartelized two-party system have contributed to weak party system institutionalization (PSI). Despite weak PSI, South Korea successfully underwent three peaceful power transfers, thus exceeding Huntington’s two turnover test of democratic consolidation. The stability of interparty competition has been maintained despite moderate electoral volatility. While regionalism is still the most important factor in voter decisions, the ideological linkage between parties and voters has been tightening. The South Korean parties and party system have a long way to go before achieving the levels of PSI seen in the West, but they have followed in these countries’ footstep to some extent. More sophisticated measures and concepts should be developed to analyse political parties and party systems in new democracies.

Are mandates obsolete?

Representative democracy relies on elections and party government. Parties play a key role to the extent that they aggregate citizens’ preferences and that they organize political competition. This in turn implies that parties, once in power, implement the programme they were elected for. There is a growing literature arguing that it is increasingly difficult for governments to implement their electoral programmes for a variety of reasons. Growing international constraints have limited government autonomy in general. As the electorate has become more dispersed and party membership has shrunk, it has, moreover, become more difficult for parties to respond to voters. Greater electoral volatility has further complicated things. As a consequence of these trends, the distinctiveness of government parties is said to have decreased. And this, in turn, could explain the decline in turnout and the rise of populist parties. This conclusion, however, is based on limited data and analyses. This chapter calls for renewed study of competition between parties and election-to-policy linkages. It suggests revisiting the thesis of mandate decline using new empirical data, adopting an agenda-setting perspective.

Electoral Performance of New Political Parties in Ukraine: The Context of Electoral Volatility at the Parliamentary Level (1998–2019)

This article is devoted to study and comparative analysis of the features and levels of support for new political parties during parliamentary elections in Ukraine, in particular the period 1998–2019. With this in mind, mainly based on the calculations of the indices of overall electoral volatility, intra-system electoral volatility and extra-system electoral volatility, we analyze the parameters of changes in electoral support (by voters) for political parties, in particular new ones, during the 1998–2019 parliamentary elections in Ukraine. In addition, we correlate overall, intra-system and extra-system electoral volatility, and present the correlation of overall electoral volatility in the sample of all political parties as the subjects of electoral processes in Ukraine and political parties elected to the national parliament (the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine). As a result, the study outlines two clusters of extra-system electoral volatility, which show the highest level of similarity, and calculates the dependence of the level of electoral volatility and stability of the party system in Ukraine. With this background, we conclude that electoral volatility in Ukraine is largely determined by the effect of party affiliation or desire to belong to the government or opposition, and is regulated by the special context of identity politics in this country.

On the causes of electoral volatility in Asia since 1948

Electoral stability has been viewed as an essential condition for the healthy functioning of representative democracy. However, there is little agreement in the literature about what shapes the stability of the electorate in general nor much attention paid to that of the Asian electorates in particular. We propose historical legacies, uniquely testable in Asia, as central determinants, but also test for conventional factors examined in other regions. By analyzing more than 150 elections in 19 post-WWII Asian democracies, we find that certain types of authoritarian (military or personalist) and colonial (non-British) legacies have a detrimental impact on the stabilization of the electorate, while some of the findings from other regions apply also to Asia. Our additional finding that such effects of historical legacies, particularly authoritarian interludes, are attenuated and cease to be significant with sufficient maturation of democracy, has important implications for the way party systems develop and democracies consolidate.

Iceland: Political Change and Coalition Politics

The chapter surveys coalition formation and coalition governance in Iceland since the 1990s. Coalition politics have been altered in a significant manner during this time period with many of the changes coinciding with the economic crash of 2008. Up to the crises, coalition governance followed a fairly predictable pattern but increased electoral volatility and decline in party cohesion complicated the formation of stable two-party coalitions. In response to these developments, governments have sought to improve coalitions management and coordination within the cabinet, which represents a shift from the ministerial model of government that has characterized Icelandic coalitions since the founding of the republic.

Choosing the Lesser Evil: Forecasting Presidential Elections in Peru

The Peruvian political landscape is dominated by the weakness of party organizations, the continuous rotation of political personalities, and, in turn, high electoral volatility and uncertainty. Nevertheless, we observe patterns of electoral competition that suggest candidates learn to capture the political center and compete over the continuation of an economic model that has sustained growth. We use this information to record the vote intention for the candidate viewed as the lesser evil. Our forecasting results predict a good share of the variation in political support for this candidate. The out-of-sample prediction also comes fairly close to the real electoral results. These findings provide some degree of electoral certainty in an area that, to date, remains understudied.

Electoral volatility of the 2019 presidential election: A study in Jakarta and Depok, Indonesia

In democratic countries around the world, electoral volatility is a challenge for political actors. Because one vote is significant, political parties and candidates are increasingly difficult to predict the preferences of citizens. This study aimed to analyze motivational factors that make voters change their choice of votes. This study employed a quantitative method and proposed three variables, including political sophistication, candidate evaluation, and exposure to media campaigns. The results of the logistic regression show that voters who positively evaluate candidates become loyal voters (p-value £ 0.001). Meanwhile, voters who consume political information from social media and the internet intensively, as well as those who are interested in politics are non-volatile voters (p-value £ 0.001 and p-value £ 0.01, respectively). These findings contrast with studies in parliamentary countries where interest in politics motivates voters to change their votes. In these analyzes, this study focuses on examining the inter-election volatility of 2014-2019 in the context of the presidential election in Indonesia. The data were obtained from a post-2019 election survey (non-probability sampling), for respondents in South Jakarta, East Jakarta, and Depok City, who had elected the president in the 2014 and 2019 elections.