Annika Werner | The Australian National University (original) (raw)

Journal Articles & book chapters by Annika Werner

Electoral Studies, 2019

How should party governments make representative democracy work? Much of the democracy representa... more How should party governments make representative democracy work? Much of the democracy representation literature assumes that voters prefer parties to fulfill the promises of their election campaigns, with higher preference for promise-keeping placed on the party a voter supports. That voters agree with these assumptions, however, remains largely unclear and this is the main hypothesis of this article. Within the context of Australia, this article investigates voter preferences regarding three ideal party representative styles: promise-keeping, focus on public opinion, and seeking the common good. Furthermore, it tests whether voters prefer their party-over other parties to keep their promises. Based on novel and innovative survey data, this study finds that, generally, voters care least about parties keeping their promises and their preferences are unaffected by their party support. These results, if confirmed in other contexts, not only challenge the primacy of promise-keeping, but also the assumed ubiquitous party effect.

Democratization, 2018

Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around ... more Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around the world. When its share is larger than the margin of victory or greater than the vote share of some of the large parties in the country, invalid voting becomes a problem for democratic legitimacy. This article investigates its determinants in 417 democratic parliamentary elections in 73 countries on five continents from 1970 to 2011. The analysis shows that enforced compulsory voting and ethnic fragmentation are strong predictors for invalid voting while corruption has less impact. Our findings suggest that the societal structure is crucial in understanding invalid voting as a problem for democratic legitimacy because greater social diversity seems to lead to either a greater rate of mistakes or lesser attachments of social groups to the democratic process. Thus, rising levels of invalid voting are not only concerning in themselves but also for the divisive factors driving them.

Journal of European Public Policy, 2018

Since the 2008 crisis, radical right populist (RRP) party positions on European integration have ... more Since the 2008 crisis, radical right populist (RRP) party positions on European integration have hardened and/or increased in salience. But do their supporters align with them on this? And what role does Euroscepticism play in driving support for these parties? Using data from the ‘euandi’ voting advice application, we examine how close over 8000 RRP supporters in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Belgium were in 2014 to their parties on European integration and, for comparison, immigration. We find that, while they closely aligned on immigration, which remains a stronger predictor of support, they did not on European integration. We conclude, firstly, that increased salience of this issue does not necessarily lead to stronger linkages between parties and voters and that the consequences of positional congruence depend on salience congruence. Secondly, our findings suggest that RRP parties enjoy flexibility on European integration and can shift positions if necessary.

International Political Science Review, 2018

The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviou... more The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviour of political parties. Large parts of the party representation literature assume that voters expect parties to fulfil the promises of their election programs. What voters actually want from parties, however, remains largely unclear. Within the Australian context, this article investigates the preferences of voters regarding three ideal party representative styles: 'promise keeping', 'focus on public opinion', and 'seeking the common good'. Using a novel survey tool, this study finds that voters value promise keeping highly when it is evaluated individually. However, they rate seeking the common good as most important when the three styles are directly compared. A multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that, in particular, voters who have been involved in party grassroots activities prefer promise keeping. These findings have wider implications for our understanding of how representative democracy can and should work.

The decline of parties, crucial actors in representative democracies over the past three decades,... more The decline of parties, crucial actors in representative democracies over the past three decades, has been of great concern for party development scholars and democracy scholars alike. Such scholars point to decreasing vote shares for established parties, the rise of third parties and niche parties, the increasingly key role played by nonparty actors in fulfilling roles traditionally the purview of parties, and decreasing party membership levels as red flags signaling the end of the party era. These observed developments are often discussed as leading to a range of distortions in the functioning of democracy. However, the assumptions underlying such causalities remain largely theoretically derived, and the causal mechanisms linking party decline and democratic malaise (or, in other words, a crisis of democracy) remain empirically untested. This chapter presents a first step toward such an empirical test and aims to link the developments in party and party system evolution to the fulfillment of the basic functions of political parties, namely, mobilization, representation, and forming and sustaining stable governments in democracies. To do so, we deduce a measurable concept focusing on size, political program, and societal rootedness which encompasses the most important party

As we enter our second year as the editorial team of the Australian Journal of Political Science ... more As we enter our second year as the editorial team of the Australian Journal of Political Science we have begun making plans for the journal’s future. With this in mind, we have recently reviewed the structure and membership of the journal’s Editorial Board and Editorial Committee. As part of this process, we have made the decision to abandon the existing dual structure of our advisory bodies and to institute a single Editorial Board. Our intention is that our new Board will be an active advisory group that not only serves as a source of evaluation and advice for the editors, but meets annually to review the journal’s performance, strategies, and future plans.

Journal of European Public Policy, Mar 31, 2017

Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Y... more Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Yet, radical right parties are divided between three EP groups: European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR); Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD); Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF). This article investigates why four radical right parties in the ECR and EFDD – the Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party, the Sweden Democrats and UKIP – neither joined the apparently more ideologically homogenous ENF nor allied all with one another in 2014. Using Chapel Hill data, we find no policy logic explaining their alliance behaviour. Rather, our interviews with those in the parties indicate that they privileged national ‘respectability’ calculations when deciding alliance strategies. We therefore propose an alternative theory of EP group formation that sees some radical parties play a two-level game in which the perceived domestic ‘office’ and ‘votes’ benefits of European alliances outweigh those of ‘policy’.

The Australian Journal of Political Science has a new editorial team. After six years of sterling... more The Australian Journal of Political Science has a new editorial team. After six years of sterling service from a team based originally at Deakin University in Melbourne, the journal’s new home is Brisbane, in the School of Government & International Relations at Griffith University.

We take stewardship of the journal at a time of fascinating local and international challenges and opportunities. Politics itself is changing, in almost every way: a declining faith in democracy and political institutions; changing modes of governance and policy-making; changing modes and values in political communication; shifts in ideologies, international relations and political economy; and the world-wide impact of climate change. These and other shifts demand analysis not just through existing lenses, but the development of new, often inter-disciplinary ones. But those opportunities come at a time of internal challenges as well: fragmentation into ever-more-isolated sub-fields, a continuing gender gap in the discipline, and government imperatives to connect academic research to wider audiences, to name just a few.
....

Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. T... more Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.

The chapter emphasizes the “supply side polarization” of politics by comparing party policy posit... more The chapter emphasizes the “supply side polarization” of politics by comparing party policy positions. To develop their analysis, the authors use data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR). While in public perception there are huge differences between both parties (and even more, between the candidates), reviewed data do not separate Democrats and Republicans sharply. While the Republicans stayed relatively stable in their conservative ideological supply, Democrats moved back onto the liberal side for the first time after 2000. Hence, this election was indeed more polarized than the elections before. But, in a more long-term perspective, the 2012 election does not stand out as particularly polarized because the polarization of 2012 is smaller than the peak elections of 1964 and the 1980s. In general, cultural (morality, abortion) and social issues (welfare, healthcare) played a strong role in the 2012 election, revealing areas of distinction between the two parties. Additionally, the chapter discusses the influence of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement on the positions of Democrats and Republicans.

This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influe... more This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influence, evaluates how much state party autonomy varies across the USA, and examines possible explanations for this variance. We use newly collected party platform data from US state parties between 2008 and 2010 to examine the policy autonomy of state vis-à-vis national parties. In general, we find that US state parties have more extreme policy positions than the national parties. We also find significant variance in the levels of autonomy across state parties and that Democratic state parties are more autonomous than Republican ones.

German Politics, 2012

The second-order character of past European elections is a well-established hypothesis with respe... more The second-order character of past European elections is a well-established hypothesis with respect to voter turnout and voting behaviour. This paper presents a conceptual framework for testing this hypothesis on the supply side of European elections. It includes three groups of indicators allowing for the comparison of national and European election manifestos to determine the latter's second-order nature: (1) resource allocation, measured by the number of actors involved in manifesto adoption and by the manifestos' length; (2) the manifestos' content, comparing issue congruence and framing; and (3) political competition, measured by the ideological distance between manifestos. Building on this, we analyse the manifestos of all relevant German parties in the 2009 European and national elections using Comparative Manifesto Project data as well as original, self-created data on election manifestos. We find major variations between parties which can neither be explained by government participation nor satisfaction with the European Union.

Superwahljahr 2009. Vergleichende Analysen aus Anlass der Wahlen zum Deutschen Bundestag und zum Europäischen Parlament., 2011

This article examines the relation between policies, institutions and time by addressing the case... more This article examines the relation between policies, institutions and time by addressing the case of eastern enlargement policy and the European Commission. Our main question is how the special challenges and requirements of EU eastern enlargement policy impacted on the administrative level of the Commission, i.e. the level in charge of structuring, monitoring and steering the policy's implementation. We provide empirical data on institutional change in the Commission from the mid-1990s until 2004 and examine temporal categories at both the policy level and the institutional level. This analysis shows that – especially the temporal – requirements of enlargement policy drove the Commission to adapt its internal organization and time management; internal structures and procedures changed; actors were bound in a temporal grid. This allowed the mobilization of the actors and the in-time synchronization of their input. On the whole, our results open a new perspective on institutional change and time in the context of European governance.

Handbooks by Annika Werner

This is the handbook for the Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR), which provides the Manifesto Project... more This is the handbook for the Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR), which provides the Manifesto Project coders with an introduction on how to apply the rules and definitions which constitute the data production process of the project. CMP’s objective is to measure policy positions of all relevant parties
competing in any democratic election in the post-World-War-II period for the following countries: OECD and EU members, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and (in the future) South-East Asia. Furthermore, the Manifesto Project
strives to measure the policy positions of presidential candidates in Latin America. Analysing manifestos allows for measurement of party and presidents’ policy positions across countries and elections within a common framework.
Manifestos are understood to be parties’ only and presidential candidates’ main authoritative policy statements and, therefore, as indicators of the parties’ policy preferences at a given point in time. For this reason, manifestos are chosen as the subject for quantitative content analysis.

This content analysis aims to discover party and presidential stances by quantifying their statements and messages to their electorate. A unified classification scheme with an accompanying set of rules was developed to make such statements comparable. This handbook provides coders with all of the relevant information, definitions, and sources needed to apply the coding scheme to their respective countries.

Papers by Annika Werner

WZB Mitteilung Heft 139, 2013

Electoral Studies, 2019

How should party governments make representative democracy work? Much of the democracy representa... more How should party governments make representative democracy work? Much of the democracy representation literature assumes that voters prefer parties to fulfill the promises of their election campaigns, with higher preference for promise-keeping placed on the party a voter supports. That voters agree with these assumptions, however, remains largely unclear and this is the main hypothesis of this article. Within the context of Australia, this article investigates voter preferences regarding three ideal party representative styles: promise-keeping, focus on public opinion, and seeking the common good. Furthermore, it tests whether voters prefer their party-over other parties to keep their promises. Based on novel and innovative survey data, this study finds that, generally, voters care least about parties keeping their promises and their preferences are unaffected by their party support. These results, if confirmed in other contexts, not only challenge the primacy of promise-keeping, but also the assumed ubiquitous party effect.

Democratization, 2018

Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around ... more Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around the world. When its share is larger than the margin of victory or greater than the vote share of some of the large parties in the country, invalid voting becomes a problem for democratic legitimacy. This article investigates its determinants in 417 democratic parliamentary elections in 73 countries on five continents from 1970 to 2011. The analysis shows that enforced compulsory voting and ethnic fragmentation are strong predictors for invalid voting while corruption has less impact. Our findings suggest that the societal structure is crucial in understanding invalid voting as a problem for democratic legitimacy because greater social diversity seems to lead to either a greater rate of mistakes or lesser attachments of social groups to the democratic process. Thus, rising levels of invalid voting are not only concerning in themselves but also for the divisive factors driving them.

Journal of European Public Policy, 2018

Since the 2008 crisis, radical right populist (RRP) party positions on European integration have ... more Since the 2008 crisis, radical right populist (RRP) party positions on European integration have hardened and/or increased in salience. But do their supporters align with them on this? And what role does Euroscepticism play in driving support for these parties? Using data from the ‘euandi’ voting advice application, we examine how close over 8000 RRP supporters in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Belgium were in 2014 to their parties on European integration and, for comparison, immigration. We find that, while they closely aligned on immigration, which remains a stronger predictor of support, they did not on European integration. We conclude, firstly, that increased salience of this issue does not necessarily lead to stronger linkages between parties and voters and that the consequences of positional congruence depend on salience congruence. Secondly, our findings suggest that RRP parties enjoy flexibility on European integration and can shift positions if necessary.

International Political Science Review, 2018

The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviou... more The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviour of political parties. Large parts of the party representation literature assume that voters expect parties to fulfil the promises of their election programs. What voters actually want from parties, however, remains largely unclear. Within the Australian context, this article investigates the preferences of voters regarding three ideal party representative styles: 'promise keeping', 'focus on public opinion', and 'seeking the common good'. Using a novel survey tool, this study finds that voters value promise keeping highly when it is evaluated individually. However, they rate seeking the common good as most important when the three styles are directly compared. A multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that, in particular, voters who have been involved in party grassroots activities prefer promise keeping. These findings have wider implications for our understanding of how representative democracy can and should work.

The decline of parties, crucial actors in representative democracies over the past three decades,... more The decline of parties, crucial actors in representative democracies over the past three decades, has been of great concern for party development scholars and democracy scholars alike. Such scholars point to decreasing vote shares for established parties, the rise of third parties and niche parties, the increasingly key role played by nonparty actors in fulfilling roles traditionally the purview of parties, and decreasing party membership levels as red flags signaling the end of the party era. These observed developments are often discussed as leading to a range of distortions in the functioning of democracy. However, the assumptions underlying such causalities remain largely theoretically derived, and the causal mechanisms linking party decline and democratic malaise (or, in other words, a crisis of democracy) remain empirically untested. This chapter presents a first step toward such an empirical test and aims to link the developments in party and party system evolution to the fulfillment of the basic functions of political parties, namely, mobilization, representation, and forming and sustaining stable governments in democracies. To do so, we deduce a measurable concept focusing on size, political program, and societal rootedness which encompasses the most important party

As we enter our second year as the editorial team of the Australian Journal of Political Science ... more As we enter our second year as the editorial team of the Australian Journal of Political Science we have begun making plans for the journal’s future. With this in mind, we have recently reviewed the structure and membership of the journal’s Editorial Board and Editorial Committee. As part of this process, we have made the decision to abandon the existing dual structure of our advisory bodies and to institute a single Editorial Board. Our intention is that our new Board will be an active advisory group that not only serves as a source of evaluation and advice for the editors, but meets annually to review the journal’s performance, strategies, and future plans.

Journal of European Public Policy, Mar 31, 2017

Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Y... more Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Yet, radical right parties are divided between three EP groups: European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR); Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD); Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF). This article investigates why four radical right parties in the ECR and EFDD – the Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party, the Sweden Democrats and UKIP – neither joined the apparently more ideologically homogenous ENF nor allied all with one another in 2014. Using Chapel Hill data, we find no policy logic explaining their alliance behaviour. Rather, our interviews with those in the parties indicate that they privileged national ‘respectability’ calculations when deciding alliance strategies. We therefore propose an alternative theory of EP group formation that sees some radical parties play a two-level game in which the perceived domestic ‘office’ and ‘votes’ benefits of European alliances outweigh those of ‘policy’.

The Australian Journal of Political Science has a new editorial team. After six years of sterling... more The Australian Journal of Political Science has a new editorial team. After six years of sterling service from a team based originally at Deakin University in Melbourne, the journal’s new home is Brisbane, in the School of Government & International Relations at Griffith University.

We take stewardship of the journal at a time of fascinating local and international challenges and opportunities. Politics itself is changing, in almost every way: a declining faith in democracy and political institutions; changing modes of governance and policy-making; changing modes and values in political communication; shifts in ideologies, international relations and political economy; and the world-wide impact of climate change. These and other shifts demand analysis not just through existing lenses, but the development of new, often inter-disciplinary ones. But those opportunities come at a time of internal challenges as well: fragmentation into ever-more-isolated sub-fields, a continuing gender gap in the discipline, and government imperatives to connect academic research to wider audiences, to name just a few.
....

Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. T... more Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.

The chapter emphasizes the “supply side polarization” of politics by comparing party policy posit... more The chapter emphasizes the “supply side polarization” of politics by comparing party policy positions. To develop their analysis, the authors use data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR). While in public perception there are huge differences between both parties (and even more, between the candidates), reviewed data do not separate Democrats and Republicans sharply. While the Republicans stayed relatively stable in their conservative ideological supply, Democrats moved back onto the liberal side for the first time after 2000. Hence, this election was indeed more polarized than the elections before. But, in a more long-term perspective, the 2012 election does not stand out as particularly polarized because the polarization of 2012 is smaller than the peak elections of 1964 and the 1980s. In general, cultural (morality, abortion) and social issues (welfare, healthcare) played a strong role in the 2012 election, revealing areas of distinction between the two parties. Additionally, the chapter discusses the influence of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement on the positions of Democrats and Republicans.

This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influe... more This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influence, evaluates how much state party autonomy varies across the USA, and examines possible explanations for this variance. We use newly collected party platform data from US state parties between 2008 and 2010 to examine the policy autonomy of state vis-à-vis national parties. In general, we find that US state parties have more extreme policy positions than the national parties. We also find significant variance in the levels of autonomy across state parties and that Democratic state parties are more autonomous than Republican ones.

German Politics, 2012

The second-order character of past European elections is a well-established hypothesis with respe... more The second-order character of past European elections is a well-established hypothesis with respect to voter turnout and voting behaviour. This paper presents a conceptual framework for testing this hypothesis on the supply side of European elections. It includes three groups of indicators allowing for the comparison of national and European election manifestos to determine the latter's second-order nature: (1) resource allocation, measured by the number of actors involved in manifesto adoption and by the manifestos' length; (2) the manifestos' content, comparing issue congruence and framing; and (3) political competition, measured by the ideological distance between manifestos. Building on this, we analyse the manifestos of all relevant German parties in the 2009 European and national elections using Comparative Manifesto Project data as well as original, self-created data on election manifestos. We find major variations between parties which can neither be explained by government participation nor satisfaction with the European Union.

Superwahljahr 2009. Vergleichende Analysen aus Anlass der Wahlen zum Deutschen Bundestag und zum Europäischen Parlament., 2011

This article examines the relation between policies, institutions and time by addressing the case... more This article examines the relation between policies, institutions and time by addressing the case of eastern enlargement policy and the European Commission. Our main question is how the special challenges and requirements of EU eastern enlargement policy impacted on the administrative level of the Commission, i.e. the level in charge of structuring, monitoring and steering the policy's implementation. We provide empirical data on institutional change in the Commission from the mid-1990s until 2004 and examine temporal categories at both the policy level and the institutional level. This analysis shows that – especially the temporal – requirements of enlargement policy drove the Commission to adapt its internal organization and time management; internal structures and procedures changed; actors were bound in a temporal grid. This allowed the mobilization of the actors and the in-time synchronization of their input. On the whole, our results open a new perspective on institutional change and time in the context of European governance.

This is the handbook for the Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR), which provides the Manifesto Project... more This is the handbook for the Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR), which provides the Manifesto Project coders with an introduction on how to apply the rules and definitions which constitute the data production process of the project. CMP’s objective is to measure policy positions of all relevant parties
competing in any democratic election in the post-World-War-II period for the following countries: OECD and EU members, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and (in the future) South-East Asia. Furthermore, the Manifesto Project
strives to measure the policy positions of presidential candidates in Latin America. Analysing manifestos allows for measurement of party and presidents’ policy positions across countries and elections within a common framework.
Manifestos are understood to be parties’ only and presidential candidates’ main authoritative policy statements and, therefore, as indicators of the parties’ policy preferences at a given point in time. For this reason, manifestos are chosen as the subject for quantitative content analysis.

This content analysis aims to discover party and presidential stances by quantifying their statements and messages to their electorate. A unified classification scheme with an accompanying set of rules was developed to make such statements comparable. This handbook provides coders with all of the relevant information, definitions, and sources needed to apply the coding scheme to their respective countries.

WZB Mitteilung Heft 139, 2013

We present a new dataset on the process of decision-making in the European Union. With the help o... more We present a new dataset on the process of decision-making in the European Union. With the help of the novel extracting programme 'Law Leecher' we are able to readout information from PreLex, which contains every official legislative and non-legislative act issued by the Commission since 1976 and offers detailed information on their evolution. All documented processes are indicated including the institution involved and the date of its involvement. By extracting this information, we will provide an online accessible, monthly updated dataset that is structured in an easy-to-use fashion but leaves all substantive decisions to the individual researcher.