The growing literature on personal vote assumes that candidates with strong local ties should be more successful electorally and more likely to break party unity in parliament. Using unique data from Estonia on candidates’ personal vote-earning attributes, such as local birthplace and local-level political experience, this research note offers the first direct test of both of these assumptions.…
Studies of the emergence and electoral success of new parties frequently suffer from conceptual and methodological flaws: effects of electoral institutions that primarily operate at the level of the constituencies are specified at the national level; central explanatory variables such as electoral demands and competitors’ responses are measured with crude proxies; the interplay of formation and…
The Laakso—Taagepera index of the effective number of parties, while satisfying most of the requirements of this aggregate quantity, tends to produce unrealistically high scores for party constellations in which the shares of the largest parties exceed 50 percent, and can produce misleading results in several other situations. After reviewing the structural properties of the Laakso—Taagepera in…
This article focuses on the participation of party members in intra-party elections and on explanations for this behaviour. The number of intra-party elections is increasing, but their study remains an under-researched phenomenon in contemporary party politics. I test whether participation theories applicable to participation in society also obtain in intra-party elections. The theories tested …
This study joins two existing logical models and tests the resulting predictions of mean cabinet duration (C). One of these models predicts C based on effective number of parties (N): C = k/N2, where k is found to be around 42 years. The other predicts N on the basis of number of seats in the assembly (S) and district magnitude (M). The new combined model leads to a prediction for the mean cab…
In the digital age it is claimed that political parties do not have the capacity to deliver the advanced technical services that modern campaigning demands, and that much of the campaign work is better handled by political consultants. Based on the ‘hybridization’ view of campaign change, the article explores to what extent ICTs increase the need for campaign professionals, and what type of pro…
In this article, I examine the roll-call voting behaviour of U.S. Senate Majority Leaders, finding that Leaders generally locate around the ideological mean and median of their party at selection and at the beginning of their tenure but move toward the partisan extreme as their leadership progresses. Statistical analysis links this movement to size of majority; that is, as their partisan majori…
Expert surveys have become increasingly popular among political scientists. One of the problems of using surveys (of any sort) to estimate party positions is that respondents can be influenced by their subjective political views. As a consequence, experts may give biased responses, and such (ideological) bias may affect certain parties more than others. In this paper, we use the latest expert s…
The literature on Western European parliaments has long pointed to an increase in non-legislative activities, including questions to the minister and interpellations; however, it has struggled to explain this development. This paper argues that the explanation ought to be sought in the increased importance of issue competition among political parties in Western Europe. Political parties are inc…
Electoral reform to a system of direct election of mayors has recently been promoted in a number of countries. It has been advocated as a way of strengthening local government, improving governance, and increasing accountability. However, studies supporting such a change have been detached from research on electoral systems and electoral reform. This article examines the consequences of a shift…
This article examines whether electoral reform in Japan replacing a single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system with a parallel mixed system has led to two-party competition in single-member districts (SMDs) in House of Representative elections from 1996 to 2005. While nationwide figures suggest declining numbers of effective candidates and losers, distinguishing SMDs by levels of urbanization r…
Traditionally, observers have characterized leadership political action committees (LPACs) as tools used by political entrepreneurs to build personal coalitions supporting their power and policy goals. We argue that political context — namely, competition for control of the House and the advancement structures created by the parties — shapes the way House members use LPAC contributions to advan…
Existing research on party aggregation focuses on the national level, relating it to changes in the federal distribution of powers. I argue that party aggregation also affects sub-national party systems, and therefore that study of party aggregation needs to extend beyond the national level. A comparative analysis reveals that party aggregation at the Indian sub-national (state) level does not …
One of the most interesting features of the 2003 Polish referendum on European Union (EU) membership was the strong link between voting behaviour in the 2003 referendum and voting behaviour in the 2001 Polish parliamentary election. In this article, we test two competing mechanisms that could account for this finding: a responsible party model, whereby citizens’ attitudes towards EU membership …
Within the rapidly growing literature on positioning political parties along policy dimensions, the rich data series collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) has been widely considered as the most systematic and objective source of information. For estimating parties’ positions on the Left—Right dimension alone, several different methods have been proposed which make use of the CMP…
How do voters respond to individual worries about the employment situation in elections? This paper examines the effect of issue salience of the employment situation on voter choice. Drawing theoretical insights from the partisan salience of issue voting theories, I argue that voters who previously supported parties on the right are likely to change their political allegiance to support a cente…
There are numerous advantages to institutionalized party systems; yet the instability in post-communist party systems has been well documented. Thus, it is increasingly important to understand how parties become institutionalized. Scholars have examined various dynamics of campaign finance’s effect on politics; however, despite this increased attention, several important theoretical and empiric…
Interactions between US political parties and social movements range from those that emphasize closeness to those that seek to preserve distance. Although previously unrecognized in organizational analysis, these strategies are similar to ones of bridging and buffering. Where they differ both from inter-organizational relations among firms and from among other non-profits, this is due to the im…
Anti-immigration parties have experienced electoral lift-off in most Western democracies, although the consequences of their victories for real-life policy outcomes have remained largely unexplored. A key question is: do electoral pressures from anti-immigration parties have a ‘contagion’ impact on other parties’ immigration policy positions? In this article, I argue and empirically demonstrate…
Prior research has shown that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of protest in the presence of open and democratic politics. Yet the meso-level political institutions that associate democratic political regimes with protest remain unknown. In this light, the article analyses the effects of political parties on the level of protest using cross-sectional time-series data from 17 Lati…