Campañas negativas en las elecciones 2000 y 2006 en México

This article explores the nature of negative campaigns that were held in both 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections. The purpose is to establish that the generalized use of negative campaigning concurs with the development of two unusual electoral processes: the transition of the State party into an opposition party (2000), and its consolidation as government (2006). Based on the theoretical claims of Shiv (1997), Lau (1999), and Finkel (1998), the author describes the development of negative campaigns in those elections that represented the starting point and the presumed consummation of the use of this kind of campaigns. With journals’ documented records and the monitoring of tv spots of both elections it is established that the 2000 presidential election used negative campaigns based on decrying the official party, while the 2006 election resorted to negative tv spots.     

The Mexican Presidential and Congressional Elections of 2000 and Democratic Transition

The article examines the presidential and congressional elections of July 2000 in Mexico. The elections brought to an end more than 70 years of single party government and the culmination of a gradual democratisation process stretching back at least a decade. The long term decline in the bases of support for the regime and the changing institutional rules for elections and parties are described by way of contextualising the campaign itself and its leading protagonists. While the new rules of the game guaranteed free and fair elections, issues of internal party democracy and negative, personality-based campaigning do not paint a universally rosy democratic picture. Analysis of the election results demonstrates how the opposition was able to move beyond its traditional geographic confines and challenge across the country. However, voters did not give an unambiguous victory to Vicente Fox; his alliance does not possess a majority in either house of congress. Divided government and developments in the party system are considered as two key issues that will shape Mexico's democratic future.     

Radical Change at the Ballot Box: Causes and Consequences of Electoral Behavior in Venezuela's 2000 Elections

This study aims to explain the victory of Hugo Chávez and his party in the 2000 Venezuelan elections, to analyze the factors that made this victory possible, and to examine the consequences for future developments in the Venezuelan political system. The decay of traditional party loyalties without the emergence of new parties deeply rooted in society (dealignment without realignment); underdevelopment; and an institutional setting dominated by a president elected by a plurality electoral system have opened the door to personality-centered politics and weak parties, which are the main features of the current political situation. Compared to the 1993 and 1998 elections, the 2000 elections once again confirm an increase in personality politics and the decay of parties as instruments for articulating interests, representation, and governance. As a consequence, this article argues, instability is likely to remain a feature of Venezuela's party system for some time.     

Manifestos and elections in Ghana's Fourth Republic

Debate continues over the factors that influence electoral outcomes or voter behaviour and alignment in elections all over the world. Several factors have been noted, including the manifestos of political parties. In spite of the potential influence of the party manifesto, several comparative and empirical studies on elections in Ghana have paid little or no attention to manifestos in determining the electoral outcomes of political parties in the Fourth Republic.This paper makes a contribution to the debate by examining how manifestos have influenced the electoral chances of the two main political parties which have been in and out of government in Ghana since the inception of the Fourth Republic, namely, the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party. Analysis covers the five elections held in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Specifically, it discusses not only the ability of the manifestos to shape policy debate but also to some extent, influence electoral outcomes. The paper concludes with some lessons learned.     

The Nexus between National Party Preferences and State Elections – A Long-Term Perspective

State elections are one of the most prominent features of Germany's multi-level political system. The prevailing view is that the standing of the national governing parties has a major influence on the results of state elections. Still, two perspectives on the nexus between national party preferences and state election results have so far received less scholarly attention: First, it remains unclear if short-term changes in the national government's popularity also have an effect on state election results. Second, do results of state elections also influence the standing of the national government? A reason for this might be that short-term factors are becoming more important for government evaluation and vote choices. This paper responds to these two questions by examining the nexus between state elections and the standing of the national government in a long-term perspective from 1977 to 2005 and by means of cross-sectional and time-series analyses.     

Splitting and making parties: Analysis of party reconfiguration in Taiwan

The development of Taiwanese party politics reached a milestone in the 2000 presidential and 2001 legislative elections. The island's pre-existing three-party system underwent a marked reconfiguration. With the split of the Kuomintang (KMT), two new parties emerged but one existing party nearly collapsed. Party politics in Taiwan have shown a continuous process of proliferation of new parties. This paper analyzes the underlying logic that drives the reconfiguration of the Taiwanese party system. A political-institution perspective is employed to show how social cleavages, mixed electoral incentives, and government formation work in dictating the transformation of the party system. This paper is supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 92-2414-H-001-019, NSC 93-2414-H-001-002, and NSC 94-2414-H-001-012.     

Two elections and a political regime in crisis: Turkish politics at the crossroads

Turkey had its fourth National Assembly elections on 7 June 2015 in the twenty-first century and this time they resulted in a hung parliament. The efforts at establishing a coalition government failed and the country moved to a snap, ‘repeat’ election on 1 November 2015. This paper focuses on how the voters registered their party preferences almost 5 months apart in the same legislative general elections and why. Using the same sample and interviewing those who lived at the same addresses as those in the ISSP Citizenship survey conducted February to April 2015 and again in October 2015, a panel data-set was constructed. A theoretical framework for voting behaviour that uses party identification, political ideology, ethnic, religious, social class identities and perceptions of the performance of the economy of the respondents to understand what factors help to influence the party preferences of the same respondents 5 months apart. A multivariate (binary logistic regression) analysis of the pre-June and October 2015 data sets revealed that economic voting had been the predominant factor in the June elections, but security concerns also interacted with popular economic evaluations in the November 2015 elections to reinstall the AKP to power.     

Party opportunism among local politicians after Taiwan’s power transition

This paper probes into a hypothesised opportunism towards political party affiliation among local politicians in Taiwan since the power transition from Kuomintang (KMT) to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rule began in 2000. Longitudinal changes in election candidates' party affiliation are analysed to see what happened to the KMT's supposedly strong base of local politicians after the change of governing party. The research finds a generally high propensity of election candidates' changing or dropping their party affiliation between elections, and an increased propensity among KMT candidates after 2000. However, defections to other parties are more common in higher elections. In grassroots elections, many candidates flow in and out of their party affiliation depending on the political circumstances, but they rarely change party. Several years after the DPP gained power in presidential elections, the new ruling party is still struggling to build a strong local party organisation.     

Government and Democracy in Mexico's Federal District, 1997–2001: Cárdenas, the PRD and the Curate's Egg

This paper analyses the challenges facing the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) administration when it became the first elected government of the Federal District in 1997. Through a daily review of press coverage between December 1997–December 2000, complemented by intensive interviewing during summer 1999, five areas of policy-making activity are analysed and evaluated. The policies entrained and their outcomes show significant advances in decentralization, devolution, and intergovernmental liaison, as well as modest improvements in environmental contamination and reduced crime, although they did not meet the high expectations generated during the Cárdenas campaign for election. However, the fresh image and invigorated confidence that his replacement Rosario Robles brought to the PRD was key in the PRD's success in the July 2nd 2000 DF elections won by López Obrador. The new administration will have to confront a more plural government structure, including five of the sixteen delegaciones and an evenly divided Legislative Assembly. López Obrador has a full six years in which to prove that a left-of-centre political party is capable of developing a 'Third Way' of governance in the DF.     

Kirchheimer Revisited: Party Polarisation,Party Convergence,or Party Decline in the German Party System

The 2005 German parliamentary elections produced two parties claiming victory, the inability to form a government, and Germany's second post-war grand coalition government. This article explores the peculiarities in the contemporary dynamic of the German party system. It considers the strategy and motivation of parties and the effect of party competition. A key focus is to revisit and evaluate the predictive power of Otto Kirchheimer's ‘end of ideology’ proposition in the German case. On the one hand, mainstream parties seem to be converging at the ideological centre across Western Europe. At the same time, some party polarisation within the party system is evident as more marginal parties such as those of the far left and far right have gained votes at the expense of the mainstream parties in recent elections. A third possibility is that both of these circumstances have produced a political void with voters becoming increasingly apathetic and non-ideological. This paper argues that in the aggregate, trends do not reflect the predictions of Kirchheimer.     

Federal-level Government Participation and State-level Electoral Performance: A Party-based Analysis of Land Elections in Germany, 1949–2017

To what extent does the federal political arena contaminate the regional one in Germany? Does a party’s position as government or opposition on the federal level have a systematic impact on its performance in Land elections? Land elections are often characterised as second order elections, but existing empirical studies that use real election data suffer from important methodological problems. Unlike previous approaches using survey data or comparing vote shares in regional and federal elections, we analyse contamination in two ways. First, we test whether a party’s role at the federal level has a systematic impact on gaining or losing office at the Land level. Second, we examine the vote difference of parties relative to their result in the previous election in the Land. Drawing on a complete dataset of all Land elections from 1949 to 2017, we find confirmation for two phenomena well known in comparative electoral studies. First, the anti-incumbency effect: government parties tend to lose votes. In the German context, as in many other multilevel systems, this is exacerbated by the second effect: contamination. Gaining power or votes on the Land level is very difficult when a party is in government on the federal level.     

Ghana's elections of 7 December 2016: A post-mortem

Ghana went to presidential and parliamentary polls on 7 December 2016, leading to the defeat of President John Mahama and the National Democratic Congress government by the opposition, the New Patriotic Party led by Nana Akufo-Addo. The outcome of the elections therefore followed in the same vein as those held in Ghana in 2000 and 2008, in which the incumbent party lost to the opposition. This article is based on a desk study review of the 2016 elections. There is a brief overview of the state of affairs in Ghana's electoral politics, followed by a discussion of Ghana's electoral reforms, the organisation and management of the elections, the candidates and the campaigns, and the outcome of the elections, as well as some of the challenges that faced the transition process.     

Why Party Organization Still Matters: The Workers' Party in Northeastern Brazil

Does party organization still matter? Much of the party literature suggests that politicians, who can use substitutes like mass media to win votes, lack incentives to invest in party organization. Yet it remains an electoral asset, especially at lower levels of government. Evidence from Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) indicates that party elites invest in organization when they prioritize lower‐level elections and that this investment delivers electoral returns. In the mid‐2000s, the PT strengthened its support across levels of government in the conservative, clientelistic Northeast. Drawing from underutilized data on party offices, this article shows that organizational expansion contributed substantially to the PT's electoral advances in the Northeast. While President Lula da Silva's (PT) 2006 electoral spike in the Northeast resulted from expanded conditional cash transfers, the PT's improvement at lower levels followed from top‐down organization building. The PT national leadership deliberately expanded the party's local infrastructure to deliver electoral gains.     

An introduction to the articles on Indonesia

Abstract

In May 1987, general elections will be held in Indonesia. These will be the fifth such elections since the country's independence in 1945, and the contesting parties will be the government electoral organization, GOLKAR, which convincingly won the last elections, the largely Muslim PPP (Unity Development party), and the small Christian and nationalist PDI (Indonesian Democratic party). After the previous elections in 1982, the Indonesian government made the claim that the proceedings had been “direct, general, free and secret,” and indeed it was difficult to find more than incidental evidence of fraud or manipulation in the conduct of the poll itself. However, this attempt by “Pancasila Democracy” to claim kinship with the Western democratic tradition studiously ignored the context of political restriction which has operated in Indonesia for the last three decades. Since such claims are likely to be revised after the coming elections to suggest that the power of the New Order government of President Suharto rests on the active consent of the people, the editors of the Bulletin have thought it appropriate to devote this issue to a closer examination of the recent political history of Indonesia.     

Partisan Attachment and Democracy in Mexico: Some Cautionary Observations

Party identification is a central concept in studies of parties and elections. Drawing from an extensive literature linking the concept of party identification to the understanding of Mexico's electoral politics, this article explores how the Mexican experience informs the understanding of party identification in general, especially in emerging democracies. There, voters' attachments to political parties are usually seen both as essential to and a positive sign of democratic development. This study finds evidence consistent with these arguments in the Mexican case but also identifies aspects of Mexican party identification that are not so clearly supportive of democratic politics; that indeed may delay or even undermine democratization. These findings illustrate the relevance of the Mexican experience to the wider literature on parties and elections, particularly the well-documented relationship between party identifications and democratization.     

Local Elections and the Turkish Voter: Looking for the Determinants of Party Choice

On 30 March 2014 Turkish voters elected their local (city) councillors. Their party preferences seem to indicate considerable correspondence with the national vote choices. So, do voters' choices in local elections differ from voters' party preferences at the national legislative elections? Based on previous research findings on Turkish voting behaviour, a list of hypotheses was compiled and tested, using binary logistic regression analyses and survey data collected immediately prior to the 2009 and 2014 local elections. The main findings are that the party lists are supported at the ballot boxes on the basis of the voters' party identification, ideological positions, and economic (dis)satisfaction, whether in national or local elections.     

On the Electoral Relevance of Education Policy in the German Länder

Education policy in Germany experienced a boom throughout the 2000s. Numerous reforms were implemented, quite far-reaching shifts of party programmes occurred, and the scope of institutions with an educational mandate widened considerably. At the same time, Landtag elections came to be seen as less dominated by federal politics. Yet we still know little about education policy's electoral relevance. The present article, following a most-likely design, analyses those five Landtag elections that were held since the reform of federalism in 2006 for which the importance of education policy ought to have been highest. It turns out that even though education is one of the very few policies which the Länder can decide upon autonomously, and despite the recent upsurge of regional factors in determining the outcomes of such second-order elections, nearly all Landtag elections are won or lost on other battlefields.     

The representational base of the Norwegian Labour Party in the 1930s

SUMMARY

The article charts the transformation of the Norwegian Labour Party, known by its acronym DNA, into a people's party. Having formed a government under Johan Nygaardsvold in 1935, in the election of 1936 the DNA reached out to almost everyone. The theme is the representation of social groups, and it is shown that the self-perceived base of the party as manifested in its propaganda and speeches went beyond blue-collar workers. In the elections of 1930 and 1933 the DNA addressed itself more often to smallholders and fishermen than to the industrial proletariat. Several writers have seen this as the key to its success, and have postulated that other Socialist parties should have copied this strategy. This article argues that there was a variety of reasons why European Socialist parties usually were not as successful as their Scandinavian counterparts. The British Labour Party did pursue the same strategy as the Norwegians, but for other reasons could not match their success. In spite of a comparative strand, the primary focus is on the appeals the DNA made in the three elections of the 1930s. The DNA's development along the road to representing all but the elite, and becoming hegemonic, is shown. The ideology of the party had only a small effect on whom it sought to represent.     

The Aboriginal Franchise and Its Consequences

This article traces the expansion (and contraction) of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander franchise for Commonwealth, state and territory elections, and to a lesser extent local government elections; it outlines the arguments made for (and against) Aboriginal enfranchisement; and it examines alternative accounts of what drove the expansion (and contraction) of the vote. It pulls together data on Aboriginal enrolment, political awareness and party support, particularly in the Northern Territory. And it examines divergent views about the consequences of Aborigines having the vote: claims that the franchise is an empty formality; claims that it has allowed Aborigines to be manipulated; and claims that it has generated benefits — symbolic, expressive and instrumental.     

WINNING COALITIONS AND ETHNO-REGIONAL POLITICS: THE FAILURE OF THE OPPOSITION IN THE 1990 AND 1995 ELECTIONS IN COTE D'IVOIRE

Why is that former dominant or single party regimes, especiallythose in Africa, have generally survived and even emerged strengthenedafter the introduction of multi-party competitive elections?In Côte d'lvoire since 1990 the ruling party has beenable to win elections by using incumbency to present itselfas the organization most likely to be capable of putting togethera winning coalition. In a society segmented by a multiplicityof cultural and religious divisions and where political poweris a zero-sum game, the logic of democratic representation meansthat no group can afford to be excluded. Yet in the 1990 and1995 Ivorian elections .the opposition attacked die ethnic characterof the government and deliberately mobilized ethnic minorities,regional and religious (Islamic) sentiments. They thereforefailed to escape, in electoral terms, from their extremely localizedstrongholds. Their attempt to mobilize around an anti-foreignerplatform in 1990 rebounded in 1995 when the government itselftook over their ‘ultra-nationalist’ stance by excludingnon-Ivorians from the elections. The consequent exclusion ofthe opposition's favoured Presidential candidate and the failureof the opposition alliance to agree on a non-northern, non-Islamicalternative candidate led to a violent boycott and the eventualcollapse of the opposition alliance.