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…
The concept of policy transfer (or ‘lesson-drawing’) has been used by theorists of public policy to explain how programmes developed in one context emerge in another. This article explores how far the insights of policy transfer can be used to understand better how campaign strategies move cross-nationally in cases where lender and borrower campaigns can be identified. Drawing on the policy tra…
In this article, I make a first attempt at identifying how coalitions are represented in a state party’s platform. Using the Christian Right as a test case for Republican coalition membership, I further examine the notion that platforms reflect elite opinion coalitions by linking coalition group influence to both elite opinion and the structure of the party organization. Using state Republican …
An accountable democracy requires institutionalized parties. A supply—demand model hypothesizes that institutionalization is a function of four sets of influences: stability in election law, persisting commitments to parties by political elites and by voters, and learning by elites and by voters. The hypotheses are tested with aggregate data from nine nationwide elections in Russia since 1993, …
In 2007, the German party Die Linke emerged as the result of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism; the successor of the Communist Party) merging with the WASG (Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit; a break away left wing of the Social Democrats). This article compares the policy position of Die Linke with the positions of the two merging partners. Using a recently developed comput…
Left—right is a convenient tool for summarizing the complexities of voter—party linkages in a manner that is comparable across contexts and that avoids the pathologies of preference aggregation in higher dimensions. Yet several reasons exist to believe that left—right is increasingly incapable of summarizing political behavior: the inability of left—right to capture policy concerns beyond econo…
In recent years, membership in established political parties has been shrinking, but at the same time members of some parties have received increased powers to help select candidates, leaders and party policies. These twin trends make it important to re-examine who is joining today’s smaller parties. As parties shrink, do they attract a changed mixture of members, possibly with different politi…
Comparative studies of party organization often use party rules and constitutions as a source of data indicating the ideological position of parties, how they are structured and how they function. Although the use of party constitutions in empirical investigations is commonplace, there is almost no systematic analysis of constitutions as discrete documents. There is little enquiry as to why par…
This article examines the impact of intra-party politics on the coalition behaviour of political parties. The policy-seeking model of party behaviour is refined by differentiating between policy purity and policy influence, arguing that the distribution of power within political parties affects how inclined they are to abandon policy ideals to participate in coalitions and thereby gain influenc…