Dynamic approaches to government formation and the generic instability of decisive structures in Japan

This paper relaxes the “party as unitary actor” assumption that characterises much theoretical work on party competition and government formation. It first sketches some of the theoretical implications of assuming that legislators are free to defect from parties of which they are members, and to join other parties that might be willing to accept them. This leads to a dynamic legislative party system that is quite distinct from the type of party system assumed by most models, which remains essentially static between elections. Working from “office-seeking” assumptions about the motivations of legislators that seem very plausible in the Japanese case, it shows that such a dynamic party system is likely to be unstable, since there are generic gains to be derived from the fission and fusion of parties. The paper then moves on to explore the Japanese case in these terms. The Japanese party system is self-evidently dynamic and characterised by a high degree of flux, with legislative parties regularly splitting and fusing between elections. The evidence suggests that large parties that pass a certain size threshold can be attractors in the dynamic system, both offering benefits to and receiving them from defectors from other parties. In this way, a “near-majority” party can pass the majority threshold between elections, as happened with the Japanese LDP.     

Predicting party identification, 1956–80: Who are the republicans and who are the democrats?

Multivariate predictions of party identification have been based on father's party and social or demographic characteristics in past studies. This paper uses two policy attitudes to predict party along with the usual predictors of partisanship, from 1956 to 1980. The policy attitudes—domestic welfare policy opinion and civil rights policy opinion—have theoretical links to partisanship stemming from the New Deal and the 1960s. Domestic welfare policy opinion is found to be a major predictor of party identification. Despite the inclusion of the two policy attitudes and correction for attenuation caused by measurement error, only about 50% of the variance in party identification can be explained.     

Party factions and the politics of coalition: Japanese politics under the “system of 1955”

The Liberal Democratic Party continuously held an absolute majority in the Japanese Lower House, under the Gojyûgonen taisei (System of 1955), from its founding in 1955 until its break-up and temporary fall from power in 1993. Until 1989, it also had a majority in the Upper House. Unlike the Italian DC, the Japanese dominant party never formally entered into coalition with another party — except for a single minor occurrence¹. Despite this continuity at one level, 15 different prime ministers presided over 48 Japanese cabinets formed between 1955 and 1993, whose average duration was 9.4 months. The re-allotment of all cabinet portfolios and party posts took place every year with a metronomic regularity and these realignments were fully-fledged exercises in coalition-building even though only one party was involved. This cabinet instability has provided evidence for the view that the LDP surrendered both policy- and decision-making power to the bureaucracy. But, since the LDP clung to the practice of yearly cabinet reshuffles rather than remedying this by simply changing the party constitution, the consequent weakening of the executive power cannot have been seen as having imposed a heavy cost. And, since the LDP held onto power for such a long time, it is obvious that this cost was successfully managed. The purpose of this paper is to treat the one-party Gojyûgonen taisei system as an important case study for coalition theory, relaxing the assumption of the LDP as an unitary actor and considering the party as a political system in its own right.     

The limits of the attractiveness premium in elections

The literature on looks and politics suggests that, at least in personalistic electoral systems, physical attractiveness helps candidates that are more attractive. We test this assumption using the unlikely case of Quebec, where provincial elections are highly salient, characterized by a strong cleavage, a sophisticated electorate and strong party- and leader-centeredness. Evaluating the effect of physical attractiveness on vote shares for nearly 5500 candidates in a multivariate analysis for four elections (i.e. 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2018), we find that physical attractiveness plays no role in determining candidates' vote shares. This applies for candidates' attractiveness score, as well as their attractiveness ranking relative to other candidates. For theory, this finding suggests that the effect of attractiveness on candidates’ electoral fortunes in winner takes all systems is contingent on other factors such as the existence of cleavages and the candidate- or party centeredness of the party system.     

Hyperaccountability: Economic voting in Central and Eastern Europe

Are citizens in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe able to hold politicians accountable at elections? The inheritance of communism—disengaged citizens, economic flux, and inchoate party systems—might be expected to weaken accountability. Looking at the results of 34 elections in 10 Central and Eastern European countries, this paper finds instead a phenomenon that it calls hyperaccountability. Incumbents are held accountable for economic performance—particularly for unemployment—but this accountability distinguishes not between vote losses and gains, but between large and small losses. This result is significant in several respects. The evidence for economic voting restores some faith in the ability of voters to control their representatives in new democracies. The consistency of punishment in the region, however, may mitigate some of the benefits of economic voting. If incumbents know they will lose, then they may decide to enrich themselves when in power rather than produce good policies.     

Party Identification and Core Political Values

Party identification and core political values are central elements in the political belief systems of ordinary citizens. Are these predispositions related to one another? Does party identification influence core political values or are partisan identities grounded in such values? This article draws upon theoretical works on partisan information processing and value‐based reasoning to derive competing hypotheses about whether partisanship shapes political values or political values shape partisanship. The hypotheses are tested by using structural equation modeling techniques to estimate dynamic models of attitude stability and constraint with data from the 1992–94–96 National Election Study panel survey. The analyses reveal that partisan identities are more stable than the principles of equal opportunity, limited government, traditional family values, and moral tolerance; party identification constrains equal opportunity, limited government, and moral tolerance; and these political values do not constrain party identification.     

Ladies against women: Explaining the political participation of traditional- and modern-role females

Data from the 1980 National Election Study are used to examine how well participation theory variables and group consciousness variables account for the nonvoting political activity of traditional-role women. Of the little variance in this activity that is explained by a regression analysis among these women (.070 after adjustments for number of respondents and variables, compared to .240 among modern-role women), most is due to two participation theory variables: party identification and efficacy. However, a discriminant function analysis emphasizes two group consciousness variables (gender consciousness and religious consciousness) and only one participation theory variable (political ideology) as the main forces that distinguish active traditional-role from active modern-role women. These findings indicate the need to make clear which comparison group — other traditional-role women or politically active modern-role women — is being used in efforts to understand traditional-role women's political conduct. The findings also call for new theoretical directions about traditional-role women's nonvoting participation, because of the weak explanatory ability exhibited by all fourteen variables together.     

Culture Wars,Secular Realignment,and the Gender Gap in Party Identification

Changes in the U.S. partisan balance over the past decade are often attributed to the enhanced political salience of cultural issues. Yet as white men have continued to become more Republican in recent years, white women increasingly identify with the Democrats. To the extent that cultural issues are influencing this partisan change, men and women must be responding differently to this cultural agenda. Using a pooled ANES data set from 1988 through 2000, I explore the extent to which cultural values are responsible for this gender realignment. Findings suggest that salient cultural issues influence the partisan choices of both men and women, however in somewhat different ways. For women, the issues themselves—reproductive rights, female equality, and legal protection for homosexuals—have become increasingly important determinants of party identification. For men, the influence of cultural conflict on partisanship is argued to be equally pervasive, albeit less direct.     

The risks and opportunities of Europe: How issue yield explains (non-)reactions to the financial crisis

The financial crisis subjected the EU to its first truly serious stress test. A majority of citizens is now opposed to further integration. But party systems have barely adjusted, instead perpetuating traditional patterns of an evasive mainstream with Euroskeptic fringes. To explain this unexpected outcome we draw on issue yield (De Sio and Weber, 2014), a general model of political competition that unites public opinion, party unity and electoral support. Issue yield highlights how the crisis affected risks and opportunities differently for pro- and anti-integration parties. For such an asymmetric constellation, the model predicts the muffled choices supplied by most parties on EU matters. We use the European Election Studies 2009/2014 and the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys 2010/2014 to document these patterns.     

Horses and hippos: Why Italian government bills change in the legislative arena, 1987–2006

Scholars interested in legislative processes pay relatively little attention to the changes made to bills in parliamentary democracies. On the one hand, comparative research has often described parliamentary institutions as ineffectual vis‐à‐vis cabinets throughout the lawmaking process; on the other hand, for a long time the rational choice literature has focused more on the formal rules regulating amendatory activity than on amendatory activity itself. Hence, very few studies have tried to explain how much government bills are altered in parliament and why. This article investigates the changes made to governmental legislation in Italy. Taking the modifications occurring during the legislative process as the dependent variable, a number of explanatory hypotheses derived from both existing scholarship and original arguments are discussed and tested. This also allows the identification of some usually unobserved aspects of the decision‐making process within the cabinet. The findings can also be relevant for comparative research since Italy has been characterised during the period under scrutiny (1987–2006) by two distinct electoral systems, two extremely different party systems (pivotal and alternational), governments with various ideological orientations and range, and both partisan and technical ministers.     

What do Parties Want? Policy versus Office

What parties want – policy, office or votes – affects how they represent their voters, make strategic decisions and respond to external changes in society. What parties strive to accomplish is crucially important for what they do. Moreover, our knowledge of what parties want affects what we expect them to do. For instance, coalition theory assumes that parties have homogeneous goals, and hence are equally likely to join coalitions given the same circumstances. However, this article investigates this basic assumption of party goal homogeneity and finds that party goals do indeed diverge. The article demonstrates that party goals are influenced by party-specific factors such as party size, policy position and intra-party politics. It therefore suggests, further, that intra-party politics should be included more systematically in future studies of party behaviour.     

Interpersonal Environment Effects on Political Preferences: The “Middle Path” for Conceptualizing Social Structure in New Zealand and Japan

The effect of interpersonal environment, as measured by the degree of heterogeneity or homogeneity of political party preferences among important others in an individual's social network, was investigated using a national probability sample in Japan and regional sample in New Zealand. In both cultures, the interpersonal environment exerted significant and consistent effects on individual voting preferences. Those who reported inhabiting relatively homogeneous interpersonal political environments (IPEs) displayed a strong tendency to vote for the same political party as the important others in their social network. This effect was robust even after controlling for party identification, attitudes, media exposure, and objectively defined group memberships. Importantly, this tendency was not predicated on the frequency of talk about politics with significant others. Implications are discussed for both micro-level and macro-level theories of social structure and political behavior; an argument is made for the importance of a middle path—the psychology of enduring relationships between people.     

The effects of membership decline on party organisations in Europe

On election day, voters’ commitment is crucial for political parties, but between elections members are an important resource for party organisations. However, membership figures have been dropping across parties and countries in the last decades. How does this trend affect parties’ organisation? Following classics in party politics research as well as contemporary organisational theory literature, this study tests some of the most longstanding hypotheses in political science regarding the effects of membership size change. According to organisational learning theory, membership decline should induce an expansion of the party organisation. However, threat‐rigidity theory and the work of Robert Michels suggest that parties are downsizing their organisation to match the decline in membership size. To test the hypotheses, 47 parties in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom) are followed annually between 1960 and 2010 on key organisational characteristics such as finances, professionalism and complexity. A total of 1,922 party‐year observations are analysed. The results of multilevel modelling show that party membership decline triggers mixed effects. Declining membership size induces the employment of more staff, higher spending and a higher reliance on state subsidies. At the same time, it also triggers lower staff salaries and a reduction in the party's local presence. The findings indicate that today's parties are targeting an organisational structure that is custom‐made for the electoral moment every four years. Faced with lasting membership decline, the party organisation retracts its organisational resources and focuses more on election day. Members matter to parties, but votes matter more.     

Voter preferences,simple electoral games,and equilibria in two-candidate contests

The fundamental assumption of spatial models of party competition is that voters possess cardinal utility functions defined on all combinations of issue positions which candidates may adopt. Furthermore, spatial theorists usually assume that utility functions have a shape common to all voters and that voters' most preferred positions are distributed in some regular manner. Employing these and attendant assumptions, the spatial theorist seeks to ascertain what deductions can be made about candidate strategies, i.e., the positions which vote or plurality-maximizing candidates should adopt in an election. It has been found that, in many situations, convergence to an opponent's positions and/or adoption of the median/mean of the most preferred positions of all voters is an important candidate strategy. In this context, two main problems have arisen: (1) difficulties of empirical or statistical analysis; (2) the abovementioned candidate strategy is generally not applicable to elections in so-called ‘plural’ societies. One path out of this latter problem has been formulated by Rabushka and Shepsle (1972). This article explores another potential solution by addressing the following question: If voters arenot characterized by cardinal utility functions, but some other type, what are the consequences for candidate strategies? The alternate assumption employed is that voters are characterized bylexicographic utility functions. The consequences for candidate strategies of this assumption are then determined for two plurality-maximizing candidates in some one- and two-dimensional, three-, five-, and seven-voter electoral games.     

Incumbency advantage and candidate characteristics in open-list proportional representation systems: Evidence from Indonesia

We use evidence from Indonesia's April 2014 legislative elections to study the relationship between incumbency, list position, candidate characteristics, and electoral success in open-list PR systems. Contrary to a recent literature identifying an incumbency disadvantage in other large developing democracies, we identify a consistent personal incumbency advantage in Indonesia. However, we argue that this advantage is mediated by party choices over how incumbents and newcomers are ranked on party lists, a key heuristic for voters in low-information electoral environments such as Indonesia.     

Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence

This article considers some of the challenges that attend efforts to assess citizen performance. We begin by demonstrating the often- unarticulated complexity of evaluating performance in any domain. To do this, we identify four distinct conceptual elements that comprise an evaluation—identification of task, selection of criterion, choice of empirical indicator, and explication of standard—and illustrate with an example that is relatively free of ambiguity: performance in basketball. Using this framework, we then review research in three general areas of study: mass belief systems and issue consistency, political knowledge, and the use of political heuristics. We find that no study articulates all four elements (or adequate substitutes associated with an alternative framework). As a result, problems arise. Most significantly, any particular study is likely to use criteria that are unsatisfactory in important respects or to employ empirical indicators that do not validly measure the criteria. Across studies, conclusions often vary as a function of unarticulated differences in assumptions, definitions, and measures. We conclude by drawing a few lessons for future research, while also recognizing the impressive progress that the study of public opinion and citizen competence has made over the last 40 years.     

The illusion of state neutrality in a secularising Ireland

It is argued that although the importance of party identification and social cleavages is declining, the bipolarity of the Swedish party system is sustained by voters’ identification with political blocs rather than with parties. Using data from the Swedish election of 2010, the article shows that voters’ bloc identification structures their voting behaviour and stabilises the party system. Four hypotheses are tested and supported. H1: Declining party identification has been replaced by bloc identification. H2: Voters with a strong bloc identification are often detached from a strong party identification, while almost all of the few voters with a strong party identification are also attached to a strong bloc identification. H3: Bloc identification has an effect on voting for parties belonging to one of the political blocs, even when party identification is controlled for. H4: Bloc identification has a small effect on electoral support for anti-establishment parties (such as the Sweden Democrats).     

Determinants of cabinet size

A large literature examines the composition of cabinets in parliamentary systems, but very little attention has been paid to the size of those cabinets. Yet not only is the size of the cabinet related to the division of portfolios that may take place, cabinet size is also related to policy outcomes. In this article, a theory of party size is considered which examines how coalition bargaining considerations, intra‐party politics and efficiency concerns affect the size of cabinets. Hypotheses derived from the theory are examined using an extensive cross‐national dataset on coalition governments which allows us to track changes in cabinet size and membership both across and within cabinets.     

The impact of at-large elections: vote dilution or choice dilution?

Multi-member, at-large legislative elections result in election outcomes different from outcomes in single-member district elections for two reasons: they cancel out the voting strength of geographically concentrated groups of voters (e.g., party groups, racial groups), and they make it difficult for a voter to vote for an individual candidate, rather than for one of the competing lists of candidates. An electoral setting in Long Island, New York, presents an opportunity to test which of these two aspects of at-large elections—vote dilution or choice dilution—accounts for the usual pattern of one party (or group) winning all the legislative seats at stake.     

India after the 2014 general elections: BJP dominance and the crisis of the third party system

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses claims that India has entered a new party system after the 2014 general elections, marked by renationalisation with the BJP as the new ‘dominant’ party.’ To assess these claims, we examine the electoral rise of the BJP in the build-up to and since the 2014 general elections until the state assembly elections in December 2018. Overall, we argue that despite the emerging dominance of the BJP, a core feature of the third party system -a system of binodal interactions- has remained largely intact albeit in a somewhat weaker form. Furthermore, by comparing the post 2014 Indian party system with key electoral features of the first three party systems, we conclude that the rise of the BJP has thrown the third-party system into crisis, but does not yet define the consolidation of a new party system.