Abundant research provides evidence that electoral systems have an impact on party system fragmentation. Taking up these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article explores the effect of electoral refoms on electoral disproportionality. Specifically, it demonstrates that permissive changes in the electoral system improve the overall correspondence between vote-shares and seat-share…
This article theorizes the strategies used by parties to expand their support base, with a particular focus on the allocation of party goods. Here, we theorize that nascent parties with goods to hand out will favour a particular type of societal group, which we name private-gain-seeking groups. We utilize Peru’s party system collapse following Fujimori’s rule as an opportunity to test our hypot…
This article argues that digital media are introducing a new grassroots-based mode of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’ (CIC) that challenges the dominant professionalized model of campaign management by devolving power over core tasks to the grassroots. After defining the practice through reference to the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and online parties literature, we devise a measure of CIC tha…
Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at the internal debates held during party congress…
The concept of the niche party has become increasingly popular in analyses of party competition. Yet, existing approaches vary in their definitions and their measurement approaches. We propose using a minimal definition that allows us to compare political parties in terms of their ‘nicheness’. We argue that the conceptual core of the niche party concept is based on issue emphasis and that a nic…
Why do members of parliament (MPs) vote against the party line? Recent explanations of party unity focus on MPs cross-pressured between the demands of competing principals such as their party and local constituencies. This article tests key claims of the Competing Principals Theory on the level of individual deputies. It relies on public statements in which MPs explain their voting behaviour. T…
Existing studies have paid a great deal of attention to how electoral systems affect party politics, but there has been little discussion in the literature on the effects of party registration rules. The theoretical importance of the impact of party registration rules on party system development lies in its temporal priority to the effects of electoral systems. This study aims to fill the theor…
Unlike existing approaches to the study of ethnic politics, this article argues that the political competition for ethnic votes in modern democracies is programmatic (i.e. distinguishable by its focus on issues and policies), much like the competition for voting blocs defined as based on class or gender. Analysing ethnic appeals in this manner makes them suitable for the type of quantification …
In the voting behaviour literature, political organizations are often mentioned as playing an important role in mobilizing a deactivated electorate. Nevertheless, researchers have paid little attention to the relationship between organization strength and Black voter participation. In this study, a direct test of the organizational strength hypothesis is examined by utilizing official voter tur…
Whereas extant work on issue ownership treats voters’ issue ownership perceptions as independent variables to explain electoral choice or party behaviour, this article examines whether parties can, by communicating on an issue, turn voters' perceptions of issue ownership to their advantage. In contrast to most previous studies that have focused on competence ownership – measured as a party's ca…
This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999?2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and t…
Electorates appear to be adrift. Across Western Europe electoral volatility is increasing. But are volatile voters whimsical? Do they behave randomly, like drift sand, or are they emancipated, not committed to a single political party but loyal to their own preferences? To answer these questions this study focuses on the Dutch electorate, which has become the most volatile in Western Europe. We…
European radical left parties (RLPs) are gradually receiving greater attention. Yet, to date, what has received insufficient focus is why such parties have maintained residues of electoral support after the collapse of the USSR and why this support varies so widely. This article is the first to subject RLPs to large-n quantitative analysis, focusing on 39 parties in 34 European countries from 1…
Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electoral…
The role of members of political parties is ambiguous because it entails both benefits and costs. In order to shed light on the question of whether members are an asset or a liability for parties, I examine whether parties use their ideology on a left–right dimension as a collective incentive for the appeal to actual and potential party members. A quantitative analysis of the effects of changes…
This article offers a spatial theory to explain how a centrist third party gains votes via the ideological depolarization of its two main competitors towards the centre ground. Using the cases of British elections in 2001, 2005 and 2010, during which the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, were ideologically similar, the article reveals how perceived similarities between these parti…
This article estimates policy positions of mainstream parties and radical right parties in seven countries in Western Europe over the past two decades. The assumption that mainstream parties have moved rightwards under pressure from the electoral success of radical right parties is assessed in close-up. A fine-grained analysis has been used to measure party distances in this specific policy fie…
Violent crime is known to be concentrated in the same urban neighborhoods as poverty and other forms of disadvantage. While U.S. violent crime has declined at an unprecedented rate over the past two decades, little is known about the spatial distribution of this decline within cities. Using longitudinal neighborhood crime data from six U.S. cities during the national crime decline, this article…
This article considers whites’ entry into black neighborhoods. The historical review in the first part of the article shows such entry to have been exceedingly rare during the twentieth century. Our analysis of trends in white entry into black neighborhoods for the period 1980–2010 documents a substantial increase in white entry for the 2000–10 decade. We speculate that the increase in white en…
This study uses a field experiment to study bias against living with Arab American women, a group whose position in the U.S. race system remains uncertain. We developed fictitious female white and Arab American identities and used the audit method to respond to 560 roommate-wanted advertisements in four metro areas: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Houston. To focus on social—rather than pur…