Crashing the Party? Elites,Outsiders, and Elections

We consider an election between two parties that nominate candidates for office. The parties are polarized along a traditional cleavage, but they are also internally divided along a second issue dimension. We introduce a threat of entry from Outsider candidates, who have the prominence and resources to bypass party elites. We consider when voters will turn to Outsiders, and identify the conditions under which Outsiders will enter the election through an established party's nomination process, as opposed to circumventing established parties via a third-party challenge. We further explore when the elites will fail to respond to the threat of Outsider candidates. Our framework highlights how established parties will be especially vulnerable to Outsider primary entry in periods of intense ideological polarization between the parties, and that this vulnerability is especially heightened for the majority party.     

Democratic Party Systems in Europe: Dimensions, Change and Stability

if a party system is really a system, i.e. a set of objects with relationships between the objects and between their attributes, and not simply an unordered set of political parties, then it is a vital problem in party research to identify the systems properties of this kind of system. We argue that the semantically relevant properties of the party systems in European democracies may be derived from the observational outcome of the operation of a party system, i.e. the national elections since the introduction of democratic procedure. Thus we arrive at five systems dimensions: functional orientation, fractionalization, radical orientation, polarization and volatility. The problems of party system change and stability are analysed by estimating the occurrence of trends and fluctuations over time in these party system dimensions for the set of European democratic party systems. The finding is that the widely accepted thesis of stability in European party systems is not corroborated.     

All That is Solid Melts into Air: Party Identification in Norway

For two decades researchers have been arguing whether profound changes were taking place in electoral politics or not. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to party identification in the European debate. In Norway, party identification has dropped dramatically since the mid-1980s. We hypothesize that the strong psychological ties between citizens and parties, described as party identification, have become a rare occurrence for several reasons. The intense debate over EU membership weakened the formation of party identification in two periods linked to the referendums in 1972 and 1994, but we also believe the observed decline in party identification to be a long-term change linked to the fading of the old cleavages and the decline of parties as mass organizations. The hypotheses have been tested on data from the Norwegian Electoral Surveys and the Referendum Surveys from 1972 and 1994. Although the hypotheses find support, alternative explanations cannot be ruled out at this stage.     

Party politicisation of local councils: Cultural or institutional explanations for trends in Denmark, 1966–2005

Local government party systems are not necessarily copies of the national party system. In many countries, local party systems have come to resemble the national one more and more – a process Rokkan termed ‘party politicisation’. The traditional expectation has been that the take‐over of local politics by political parties, through a gradual process of societal modernisation, would eventually be complete. More recently, however, it has been suggested that reorganisations of the institutional set‐up – that is, amalgamations of municipalities – could entail developments in the degree of local party system nationalisation. This article investigates cultural and institutional explanations for party politicisation by analysing the Danish case from 1966 to 2005 – a period that witnessed both major amalgamation reforms and periods of stability in the local government structure. The data suggest that dramatic party politicisation does not lend itself to cultural explanations, but originates exclusively from changes in the institutional set‐up. Party politicisation is not a gradual process, but comes – at least in Denmark – in leaps coinciding with major reorganisations of the local government structure.     

Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization

When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.     

Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789–2000

Why does the influence of Congressional parties fluctuate over time? Building on prevailing answers, we develop a model, Strategic Party Government, which highlights the electoral motives of legislative parties and the strategic interaction between parties. We test this theory using the entire range of House and Senate party behavior from 1789 to 2000 and find that the strategic behavior of parties complements members' preferences as an explanation for variation in party influence. Specifically, the strongest predictors of one party's voting unity are the unity of the opposing party and the difference between the parties in the preceding year. Moreover, we find strong links between party behavior in Congress and electoral outcomes: an increase in partisan influence on legislative voting has adverse electoral costs, while winning contested votes has electoral benefits.     

Unemployment and Party Choice in Norway

By the late 1980s, the absolute number of jobless in Norway had reached the same level as that during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment in the 1930s is known to have had an impact on party choice. Among those hit by unemployment in the 1980s, however, we no longer find a strong correlation between unemployment and party choice. This situation constitutes the point of departure for this article. The relationship between joblessness and party choice is investigated on the basis of four hypotheses: (i) The incumbency thesis , which suggests that the incumbent party receives support in accordance with fluctuations in economic conditions - i. e. it is punished in bad times and rewarded in prosperous times, (ii) The policy thesis , which predicts that voters concerned about unemployment prefer the Labour Party, (iii) The social composition thesis , which argues that the fluctuations between unemployment and party choice are simply due to changes in the social composition of the unemployed, (iv) The generation thesis , which underscores that the impact of unemployment on party choice varies according to historical generation. Confronted with empirical evidence, the social composition thesis is rejected. Likewise, support for the policy thesis has gradually vanished. Some empirical support is given to the incumbency thesis . In the end, however, the generation thesis appears to be the most relevant.     

Explaining Women's Rights Realignment: Convention Delegates, 1972–1992

Since the early 1970s, the major American parties have moved from general consensus on women's rights issues to sharp polarization. While previous efforts to explain this realignment have identified pieces of the puzzle, these explanations have been generally incomplete and atheoretical. I argue that party positions are determined by the perceived value of specific issue positions for maintaining and expanding the party's coalition of electoral support. Thus, changes in both the composition of the party's coalition and the way the issue is defined and understood can bring about changes in the issue positions adopted by parties. Using the Convention Delegate Studies (1972–1992), this research suggests that both replacement (coalition change) and in the case of Democrats, conversion (caused by issue change) have been important mechanisms for bringing about party realignment on women's rights. This explanation both encompasses causal factors highlighted by previous scholars and points to other important contributing causes.     

Partisans in Robes: Party Cues and Public Acceptance of Supreme Court Decisions

The public perceives the Supreme Court to be a legal institution. This perception enables the Court's legitimacy‐conferring function, which serves to increase public acceptance of its decisions. Yet, the public acknowledges a political aspect to the Court as well. To evaluate how the public responds to the different images of the Supreme Court, we investigate whether and how depictions of specifically partisan (e.g., Republican) Court rulings shape public acceptance of its decisions while varying institutional, legal, and issue characteristics. Using survey experiments, we find that party cues and partisanship, more so than the imprimatur of the Court, affect public acceptance. We also find that polarization diminishes the effect of party cues. Attributing a decision to the Court does little to increase baseline acceptance or attenuate partisan cue effects. The Court's uniqueness, at least in terms of its legitimacy‐conferring function, is perhaps overstated.     

Run,Jane, Run! Gendered Responses to Political Party Recruitment

Many researchers point to gender inequities in party recruitment practices to explain women’s underrepresentation on the ballot. However, there has been little systematic research about how men and women respond to recruitment, so we do not know whether gender-balanced recruitment would actually lead to gender-balanced outcomes. We conduct two studies to address this question. First, in cooperation with a county Republican Party, we identically recruited 5510 male and 5506 female highly active party members to attend a free candidate training seminar. Republican women were half as likely to respond to the invitation as men. Second, we conducted a survey experiment of 3960 voters on the Utah Colleges Exit Poll. Republican men’s level of self-reported political ambition was increased by the prospect of elite recruitment significantly more than Republican women’s, thereby increasing the gender gap vis-à-vis the control. The gender gap in the effect of recruitment on political ambition among Democrats was much smaller. Together, these findings suggest that to fully understand the role recruitment plays in women’s underrepresentation, researchers must understand the ways in which men and women respond to recruitment, not just whether political elites engage in gendered recruitment practices.     

Party system dynamics in post-war Japan: A quantitative content analysis of electoral pledges

Qualitative accounts of Japanese party politics allude to the standard left-right spectrum, but they invariably devote much more space to discussions of foreign policy differences than to socioeconomic conflict. Quantitative estimates of Japanese party positions treat short party responses to newspaper interviews as if they were true manifestos, and fail both to confirm the claims of the qualitative literature and to demonstrate any consistent basis for party differentiation at all. We address both puzzles by applying a text scaling algorithm to electoral pledges to estimate Japanese party positions on three major policy dimensions. Our analysis largely confirms the findings of the qualitative literature, but also offers new insights about party movement and polarization over time.     

提升政党文化影响力与文化自觉

政党文化是执政党能力的重要组成部分,是判断党执政能力强弱的重要标尺。政党文化的影响力与文化自觉有着密切的联系,政党精神力量的发掘、传承在很大程度上取决于文化自觉。坚守和彰显马克思主义的指导地位、扩大政党主流意识形态的凝聚力、发挥和强化政党道德的约束力都离不开党员和党员领导干部的道德自觉和文化自觉。因此,要提升党的执政能力就必须提升政党文化的影响力,自觉推进马克思主义理论创新,加强政党文化建设,发挥政党道德的自律作用,依靠党员和党员领导干部的道德自觉和文化自觉形成与党的执政地位相适应的文化软实力。     

Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge

Party cues provide citizens with low‐cost information about their representatives’ policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens’ knowledge of their senators’ positions on seven high‐profile roll‐call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics “go bad,” it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.     

The Role of Party Activists in the Evolution of the Abortion Issue

This article examines the role of party activists in the partisan evolution of the abortion issue. Previous research indicates that party elites—specifically members of Congress—and partisans in the mass public have become more differentiated in their abortion attitudes during the last several decades with Democrats becoming more pro-choice and Republicans becoming increasingly pro-life. The missing piece of the picture is the behavior of party activists. Accordingly, this research examines the changes in the abortion attitudes of two groups of party activists during the last three decades: campaign activists and national convention delegates. From 1972 to 1980 there were no significant differences in the abortion attitudes of Republican and Democratic campaign activists, and the mean positions of the two parties' national convention delegates did not differ greatly. However, since 1984 there has been a growing differentiation in the abortion positions of both groups of party activists. Now Democratic activists are consistently pro-choice while Republican activists are equally pro-life. This evidence indicates that the differentiation on the abortion issue that has only recently emerged among partisans in the mass public was predated by an earlier and much more dramatic polarization that had already developed among party activists and elites, thus supporting a model of issue evolution introduced by Carmines and Stimson in their study of racial issues. We also find that citizens' abortion attitudes have become increasingly correlated with party voting not just in presidential elections but also in House, Senate, and gubernatorial contests during this period as well as being more closely related to political ideology. All of this evidence points to the growing extent to which abortion has become a partisan issue in American politics and the key role that party activists have played in this process.     

Political Orientation,Party Affiliation,and American Attitudes Towards China

Little is known about how the political orientations and party affiliations of ordinary Americans impact their perceptions of China. Based on our surveys, we find that partisanship does indeed impact American views of China. Self-reported “conservatives” perceive significantly greater threat in China’s rise, hold more negative views of the Chinese government, exhibit more prejudice towards the Chinese people, and advocate a much tougher U.S. China policy than self-reported “liberals” do. Republicans perceive significantly greater threat from China and advocate tougher China policies than Democrats do, but party affiliation has a lesser impact on prejudice scores. Regression analyses reveals that education, gender, and age each has an impact on American views of China, but that impact is negligible compared to partisanship.     

Does polarization affect even the inattentive? Assessing the relationship between political sophistication,policy orientations,and elite cues

In this paper we focus on how individuals’ level of political sophistication conditions how they respond to growing elite polarization. The party coalitions in the electorate have become increasingly ideologically sorted. We assess whether all citizens have sorted into the ideologically “correct” partisan camp or whether this phenomenon is limited only to the highly sophisticated. Using a combination of ANES and DW-NOMINATE data we show that individuals of all sophistication levels have become more likely to identify with and vote for the party that best matches their policy orientations as a function of increasing elite-level polarization. Our findings suggest that the effects of increasing polarization are felt throughout the electorate.     

Party leadership and party institutionalisation: Three phases of development

The use of the party manifesto data (PMD) to identify parties' position in the political space provides a rather distorted picture of the Italian party system. Three possible explanations for this are explored, namely that the Italian party system is exceptional, that there are flaws in the data and there might be flaws in the methodology. The article argues that none of these explanations is fully satisfactory and advances the hypothesis that the PMD left–right scores do not indicate parties' positions but instead indicate parties' direction, that is how (and how much) parties move to adjust to changing political conditions and to remain competitive. Statistical analyses, performed to test the validity of the directional interpretation of the left–right scores, support this new interpretation.     

Party Sub-Brands and American Party Factions

Scholars and pundits have long noted the dominance of the American two-party system, but we know relatively little about new, endogenous institutions that have emerged within the two major parties. I argue that ideological factions provide party sub-brands, which allow legislators to more precisely define their partisan type and capture faction-specific resources. To support this claim, I analyze new data on nine ideological factions in the House of Representatives (1995–2018). I find that (1) faction voting is distinct, suggesting a product ripe for party sub-branding, and (2) joining a faction changes the ideological composition of a candidate's donor base—conditional on the strength of the faction's institutions. Party sub-branding is effective only when factions possess organizational features that induce coordinated and disciplined position taking (e.g., whips, PACs, membership restrictions). These results suggest that, even within highly polarized parties, American political ideology is more than a dichotomous choice, and factions target niche markets of political donors as a means of blunting financial instruments of party power.     

The Bipolar Voter: On the Effects of Actual and Perceived Party Polarization on Voter Turnout in European Multiparty Democracies

Despite the growing literature on polarization, students of comparative politics have not yet been able to reach much assured understanding of how party polarization influences voter turnout in multiparty settings, which often put on offer both centrist, and divergent mainstream and niche party policies. I evaluate how politically sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens with different ideological preferences respond to high and increasing party polarization by employing individual- and party system-level data from 17 European multiparty democracies. I hypothesize that high levels of actual and perceived party polarization increase voter turnout, and policy seeking, sophisticated citizens are more likely to turn out when polarization in party policy offerings in the short run increases their utility from voting. The empirical analyses show that high party polarization increases both politically sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens’ propensities to turn out. However, such positive effect for the most part comes from the between- and within-party systems differences in actual party polarization, rather than how individual citizens perceive that. The implications of these findings with respect to strategic position taking incentives of political parties and the effects of the knowledge gap between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens on political participation and democratic representation are discussed in the concluding section.     

Party Strength,the Personal Vote,and Government Spending

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are strong, then legislators will demand less distributive spending because of a decreased incentive to secure a “personal vote” via local projects. We estimate that spending in states with strong party organizations is at least 4% smaller than in states where parties are weak. We also find evidence that strong party states receive less federal aid than states with weak organizations, and we theorize that this is because members of Congress from strong party states feel less compelled to secure aid than members from weak party states.