The Evolution of New Party Systems: Voter Learning and Electoral Systems (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections
American Journal of Political Science, 2003
Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility-maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolution of party systems between elections in these terms and discuss this analytically, exploring unanswered questions using computational methods. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, our results strikingly highlight the role of the largest party, especially when it is "dominant" in the technical sense, as a pole of attraction in interelectoral evolution. T he existing political science account of party competition pays little attention to the evolution of legislatures between elections, despite the fact that, in all real legislatures, there is a great deal of politics between elections. In particular, legislators may defect from one party and join another, parties may split and fuse, and the party system may thereby evolve into one quite different from that produced by the election result. This carries obvious analytical implications for modeling party competition and important normative implications for our appreciation of representative democracy. In supplying the link between the popular mandate and public policy in representative democracy, the forces that shape legislatures between elections are clearly very important. While there is a literature on party switching in the U.S. Congress (e.g., Nokken 2000), exploration of this in other contexts is very limited. Yet it is precisely in multiparty systems that the phenomenon is most prevalent and important. In the Italian legislature between 1996 and spring 2000, for instance, more than one in four deputies changed parties at least once (Heller and Mershon 2001, 2). Similar patterns of party switching can be seen in Japan (Laver and Kato, 2001), Poland (Benoit and Hayden 2001), and elsewhere (see Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999). At present there is very little work modeling this process in a multiparty context. Existing studies focus on party discipline (Heller and Mershon 2001), the electoral connection
A new theoretical development for examining the institutionalization of party systems is proposed in this paper. We build on electoral coordination theories to disaggregate volatility into the vote transfers that occur between or towards parties that are in equilibrium (which we call endogenous volatility) and those that are not (exogenous volatility). The former captures accountability, and the latter reflects the number of voters who are acting in accordance with the existing equilibrium in the party system. Exogenous volatility measures the institutionalization of party systems. We also show that endogenous volatility depends on government performance, while exogenous volatility is a function of institutional openness. The empirical evidence comes from an original data set that includes 448 electoral cycles in lower-house elections in 66 countries between 1977 and 2011.
How Parties Create Electoral Democracy, Chapter 2
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2006
Parties neither cease to exist nor cease to compete for office when the general election is over. Instead, a new round of competition begins, with legislators as voters and party leaders as candidates. The offices at stake are what we call “mega-seats.” We consider the selection of three different types of mega-seats—cabinet portfolios, seats on directing boards, and permanent committee chairs—in 57 democratic assemblies. If winning parties select the rules by which mega-seats are chosen and those rules affect which parties can attain mega-seats (one important payoff of “winning”), then parties and rules should coevolve in the long run. We find two main patterns relating to legislative party systems and a country's length of experience with democratic governance.
Conventional wisdom suggests candidate-centered electoral systems are associated with less cohesive parties, but little evidence supports this expectation. We show that, when accounting for incentives of party leaders, candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting cohesion to achieve voting unity as a means to avoid relying on discipline. Our model derives implications of control over list rank held by leaders for cohesion under open lists (OLPR) and closed lists (CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR due to leaders' minimal control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote cohesion among members. Meanwhile, in CLPR, leaders can achieve unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote cohesion. These results hold after allowing for different sources of vote share and allowing leaders to recruit new members. We conclude that candidate-centered systems offer stronger incentives for ideological cohesion and programmatic party development compared to party-centered systems.
2011
It has generally been acknowledged that the parliamentary type of government induces more cohesive and, hence, more party based modes of representation. Even though this is true, the relationship is far from being perfect and it can be stated that in newly established parliamentary democracies party cohesion is an indicator of institutionalization. This paper investigates systematically and comparatively how party unity of parliamentary democracies developed shortly after the installation of a/the parliamentary government. It explores to what extent the institutions' incentive structure (i.e. discipline and self discipline, respectively) or processes of socialisation (i.e. party cohesion) are causes of party unity. After in depth analysis of single cases, a multivariate analysis tries to control for intervening factors. The findings support the notion that despite the strong rationale of acting within a parliamentary type of government processes of socialisation do account for p...
Electoral coordination and party system institutionalization
Party Politics, 2019
A new theoretical development for examining the institutionalization of party systems is proposed in this paper. We build on electoral coordination theories to disaggregate volatility into the vote transfers that occur between or towards parties that are in equilibrium (which we call endogenous volatility) and those that are not (exogenous volatility). The former captures accountability, and the latter reflects the number of voters who are acting in accordance with the existing equilibrium in the party system. Exogenous volatility measures the institutionalization of party systems. We also show that endogenous volatility depends on government performance, while exogenous volatility is a function of institutional openness. The empirical evidence comes from an original data set that includes 448 electoral cycles in lower-house elections in 66 countries between 1977 and 2011.
When does the personal vote matter? Party discipline under candidate-centered electoral systems
Parliamentary Affairs, 2019
When do candidate-centred electoral systems produce undisciplined parties? In this paper we examine party discipline under open list proportional representation, a system associated with MPs cultivating personal constituencies. We present a model explaining how legislators' preferences and support among voters mediate political leaders' ability to enforce discipline. We show that disloyalty in candidate-centred systems depends on parties' costs for enforcing discipline, but only conditional on MP preferences. MPs who share policy preferences of their leaders will be loyal even when the leaders cannot discipline them. To test the model's implications, we use data on legislative voting in Poland's parliament. Our empirical findings confirm that disloyalty is conditioned on party leaders' enforcement capacity and MP preferences. We find that legislators who contribute more to the party electorally in terms of votes are more disloyal, but only if their preferences diverge from the leadership. Our results suggest that the relationship between open lists and party disloyalty is conditional on the context of the party system.