Candidate Matters

In Candidate Matters: A Study of Ethnic Parties, Campaigns, and Elections in Latin America, Karleen Jones West argues that the characteristics of individual candidates campaigning in their districts shapes party behavior. She does so through a detailed examination of the Pachakutik indigenous party in Ecuador, as well as with the analysis of public opinion in fifteen Latin American countries. Ethnic parties that are initially programmatic can become personalistic and clientelistic vehicles because vote-buying is an effective strategy in rural indigenous areas, and because candidates with strong reputations and access to resources can create winning campaigns that buy votes and capitalize on candidates’ personal appeal. When candidates’ legislative campaigns are personalistic and clientelistic in their districts, niche parties are unable to maintain unified programmatic support. By combining in-depth fieldwork on legislative campaigns in Ecuador with the statistical analysis of electoral results and public opinion, this book demonstrates how important candidates and their districts are for how niche parties compete, win, and become influential in developing democracies. In the process, the author shows that, under certain conditions, niche parties—such as ethnic parties—are not that different from their mainstream counterparts.

The Implications of Individual Campaigns, Elections, and Clientelism for Ethnic-Party Behavior

This chapter discusses some of the implications of the findings of the previous chapters, not only for the Pachakutik party and the indigenous movement, but for all niche parties competing in developing democracies. While ethnic parties certainly provide opportunities for increased indigenous representation, their involvement in the political arena has produced some troubling results. In particular, the chapter focuses on the fragmentation of Pachakutik, the apparent decline in support among the indigenous population, and the reliance on patronage within campaigns as indications of ethnic-party struggles. The chapter also argues that the anticipated positive effects of ethnic parties may be tempered by the barriers they face to achieving their goals of substantive representation within the formal political arena. In the process, the analysis shows how these findings fill a gap in the literatures on ethnic politics, institutions, and party evolution.

Ethnic Parties and Their Candidates Matter

This chapter argues that ethnic parties are a type of niche party, while highlighting the political relevance of ethnic parties and providing data on ethnic parties that compete in legislative elections around the world (in Asia, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa). The chapter then explains how the extant literature on ethnic parties is limited because it ignores the behavior of individual candidates campaigning in their districts. A review of the literature on party behavior shows how individual campaign strategies connect with those goals. The chapter concludes by discussing the innovative methodologies this book uses to demonstrate how individual candidates matter in elections; the text also provides an overview of how the rest of the book advances the view that niche parties are similar to other parties in their behavior, largely because they are constrained by the strategies that individual candidates adopt.

FRAGMENTATION OF REGIONALISM AS A FACTOR OF ITS DYNAMICS

The emergence of new arenas of representation in the context of increasing European integration and the complexity of a multilevel management system leads to qualitative changes in regionalist parties. Transforming from “niche” parties, regionalist parties acquire a new place in regional party systems, which affects the overall electoral success of the regionalist movement. At the same time, in many cases there is a fragmentation of regionalism, in some cases, the number of regionalist parties reaches ten or more. On the other hand, the tolerance of national parties towards decentralization further enhances electoral competition in the regionalist segment. The study is intended to answer the question of how the complexity of inter-party interactions affects the electoral dynamics of regionalism. Based on two competing theories (ethnic outbidding and the theory of "nested" competition "), a hypothesis is put forward on the diversification of supply as a factor favorable for the regionalism dynamics. It finds confirmation on the empirical material of the Italian autonomies (South Tyrol, Sardinia, Valle D'Aosta). At the same time, the study shows that some factors such as internal party cohesion, the coalition policy of regionalist parties, and their government status also have a significant impact on the dynamics of regionalism.

Disentangling Europe

In many ways, the process of Europeanization has been running parallel to other processes, most prominently, that of globalization. While it appears that many of the changes, we see in the political landscapes of the member states can be attributed to the impact of the EU , it may also be the case that these are brought about by increased economic interdependence. The rise in popularity of niche parties and a hollowing out of alternatives with regard to economic policies are two of the most prominent effects that are found to be correlated with an increased participation in European integration. In this paper, I am assessing these claims against the alternative hypothesis, which places the causal power with globalization in general, rather than the integration specific to Europe. By employing matching techniques, I am providing a cleared picture of the dependence of the above mentioned domestic political outcomes on the parallel and often confounding processes of Europeanization and globalization.

Issue Diversification: Which Niche Parties Can Succeed Electorally by Broadening Their Agenda?

This work proposes an explanation for nationalist party success based on successful issue competition. Niche parties, it has been argued, gain votes by concentrating on their “owned” issues, such as environmentalism for green parties and mono-culturalism for nationalists. We argue that nationalist parties may increase their vote share by engaging in issue competition with mainstream parties and expanding the diversity of issues emphasized in their platforms. Because of their position and ideology, green parties are not able to engage in such an electoral strategy. Relatedly, no such reward exists for nationalist parties in well-documented majoritarian systems. In party systems with a size typical of proportional systems, we find that as nationalist parties broaden their issue agenda from highly specialized positions, they are able to increase their vote share. Our findings have significant implications for the study of party–voter issue linkages and party competition in fragmented political space.

The Issue Content of West European Party Politics

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book and discusses its implications. The theoretical argument of the book presented in the issue incentive model is that the vote and office incentives of large, mainstream parties are the key to explaining how policy issues rise and decline on the party system agenda. Furthermore, the argument is that the vote and office incentives of large, mainstream parties depend on three factors, namely issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations. Empirically, the book highlights the more complex party system agenda with the decline, but not disappearance, of macroeconomic issues as well as the rise in ‘new politics’ issues together with education and health care. Moreover, various ‘new politics’ issues have seen very different trajectories. Finally, the chapter lays out the implications of these findings for two larger debates within the study of West European party politics. One debate is about the role of niche parties and the consequences of their growth for the West European party system. The second debate is about the linkage between voters and political parties in contemporary Western societies. Discussing these implications also sheds light on the implication of more recent developments within West European party systems, namely the electoral decline of large, mainstream parties.

The Issue Incentive Model of Party System Attention

This chapter presents the ‘issue incentive model of party system attention’. This model uses the issue competition literature and policy agenda-setting theory as a platform for building a theoretical framework with individual issues as analytical points of departure, and at the same time, the model focuses on explaining the entire issue agenda and not just individual issues. The issue incentive model explains the issue content of party politics through the incentives that different issues offer to large, mainstream parties. The concept of the party system agenda is a key element in the framework as it is the dependent variable. The model is not focused on explaining party attention at a particular time such as during an election campaign, for instance; focus here is on attention in the medium term such as a decade. The concept of the party system agenda highlights the interaction among political parties and their shared perceptions of which issues are important. The incentives for large, mainstream parties with regard to a particular issue are argued to be decisive; partly because large, mainstream parties are much more flexible in terms of issue attention than niche parties are, and partly because the largest parties traditionally dominate government formation and thus politics. Furthermore, three types of incentives are argued to be particularly decisive for whether large, mainstream parties want to pay attention to an issue: issue characteristics, issue ownership, and coalition considerations.