Party system volatility, regeneration and de-institutionalization in Western Europe (1945-2015) (original) (raw)
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Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica
Over the last decades, Western European party systems have experienced growing levels of electoral volatility and the recurring emergence of successful new parties. This evidence calls into question the issue of party system institutionalization (PSI), a topic taken for granted so far in Western Europe, following the conventional wisdom that party systems are highly institutionalized in this region. This article tackles this issue and provides some contributions: it offers a theoretical clarification of PSI and develops an index allowing for cross-country and cross-time comparability; it looks for an explanation, by testing the impact of various potential determinants and their changes over time. Covering 324 elections in 19 countries since 1945, the analysis shows that, since the 1970s, a process of de-institutionalization is going on and that PSI is mainly a function of the cleavage structure and the number of parties, with economic performance becoming relevant only in the last p...
CLEAVAGES, PARTY STRATEGY AND PARTY SYSTEM CHANGE IN EUROPE EAST AND
Manuscript version of ar CLEAVAGES, PARTY STRATEGY AND PARTY SYSTEM CHANGE IN EUROPE EAST AND WEST”, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 3:3 (2002), 425-451 More than a decade after the collapse of communism in East Central Europe the question of party system consolidation and stability remains somewhat contentious. It is sometimes argued that these systems are more unstable than their western counterparts, because of the nature of the transitions, the instability of the parties or the volatility of the electorates in East Central Europe. However, analysed in a comparative politics perspective the party systems of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and even Slovakia reveal underlying patterns of stability. Developments since the 1997-98 round of elections in the region are perhaps better analysed in terms of party system change than as indications of continued instability. In what follows, the development of competitive politics in the region is analysed from a comparative politics perspective, building on the West European politics literature in general and Lipset & Rokkan's 'cleavage model' of party system development in particular. 1 This warrants reconsidering some of the assumptions in the West European politics literature in the light of the post-communist context, which in turn permits some tentative conclusions about party system stability and change in general. The political parties, and particularly party strategy, emerge as the central variable in this analysis. The following analysis takes Lipset & Rokkan's model of party system formation as a starting point, albeit more as a heuristic device than applied directly to post-communist East Central Europe. The first section therefore constitutes an effort to adapt the model for application beyond its core cases, reconsidering some of the explicit and implicit assumptions about institutional design, cleavages, voters, and parties in the light of the conditions of post-communism. The second section turns to party strategy, suggesting that post-communist parties have been free to adopt a range of party strategies, some more successful than others. The third section briefly addresses the development of systematic party competition in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, suggesting that a degree of party system stabilisation was evident by the 1997-98 elections in terms of patterns of party competition and government formation. The concluding section considers the implications for party system stability and change in Europe, both East and West.
Patterns of Party Structural Change in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990-2015
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While parties in many new democracies frequently split, merge, change labels, and make and break electoral alliances, comparative systematic research on how these changes are related to each other is limited. Literature on political parties often treats di↵erent forms of party change as manifestations of a singular and single-dimensional phenomenon of party instability. This study examines the dimensionality of party structural change in 11 countries in Central and Eastern Europe. We apply Multiple Correspondence Analysis to an original dataset that di↵erentiates between five types of party structural change and examines 780 party-electoral term dyads. Our findings contradict the idea of party structural change as a uni-dimensional phenomenon. Instead we distinguish between between two types of change: temporary change (entry to and exit from electoral coalitions and changes in electoral labels) and permanent change (splits and mergers). A more fine-grained classification also discerns between change that brings about party system aggregation and fragmentation. These findings imply that di↵erent types of party structural change can not be accounted for by the same factors.
The dynamics of European party systems
European Journal of Political Research, 1997
In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that the European party systems are stable and that they reflect the societal cleavage structures of the past. One developmental aspect of the party systems is singled out for description and analysis in this paper. It is argued that European party systems in terms of electoral volatility, i.e., rates of net change in the electorates, are drifting away from each other. Some of the party systems which have traditionally been considered volatile, apparently are becoming less so, while some other systems are taking on the character of highly volatile party systems. A simple set of hypotheses, based upon the notion of party space, is proposed in order to account for the variation observed. The data lend support to the hypothesis that electoral volatility is a function of the format of the party system and of short-term changes in that format.
Patterns of party change in Central and Eastern Europe, 1990–2015
Party Politics, 2016
While parties in many new democracies frequently split, merge, change labels, and make and break electoral alliances, comparative systematic research on how these changes are related to each other is limited. This study addresses this gap by conceptualizing change as a result of intra-party conflicts, conflicts in or consolidation of existing electoral alliances, and the formation of new alliances and mergers. We develop measures for each type of change using an original dataset that covers almost 800 party-electoral term dyads in 11 countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the period between 1990 and 2015. Our findings contradict the idea of party change as a uni-dimensional phenomenon. Instead we find that exits from existing electoral alliances, their consolidation through mergers, and the formation of new alliances and mergers are moderately related to each other, but not with intra-party splits. Our findings suggest that parties and their alliances structure political competi...
Mergers and splits: how party systems have changed in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990
2016
The party systems of Central and Eastern Europe are generally viewed as being less stable than those in Western Europe, with a greater level of volatility in terms of the parties that compete in successive elections. But how has this picture changed since 1990? Using a new dataset covering 11 countries, Raimondas Ibenskas and Allan Sikk outline some of the key factors that have underpinned splits and mergers between different parties within the region. The establishment of democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, Latin America, SouthEast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the last three decades has led to heated debates about the functioning of party democracy across these countries. In comparison to their Anglo-Saxon or continental Western European counterparts, political parties in most of these young democracies are less stable.
Party system change in EU countries: long-term instability and cleavage restructuring
The European Parliament Elections of 2019, 2019
This chapter deals with the analysis of party system change in Europe after the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. Our task is threefold. First, we explore the patterns of electoral instability in Europe at the 2019 EP elections and compare them across countries and over time. Second, we compare trends and variations in electoral instability between national and EP elections, following the expectations derived from the SecondOorder Election (SOE) theory (Reif and Schmitt 1980). Third, we aim to understand the underlying dimensions of competition and cleavage structures in the 28 European party systems. From an empirical viewpoint, our analysis is based on data taken from a recently published dataset on electoral volatility and its internal components in EP elections since 1979 (Emanuele et al. 2019).