Negative partisanship and the populist radical right: The case of Norway

With the rise and influence of populist radical right (PRR) parties in Western European democracies, research has focused on explaining the PRR vote. We know less about the reasons why many people would never vote for these parties. Recent research has pointed out that negative partisanship may be particularly prominent in the case of PRR parties. This study contributes to that line of research. It demonstrates that the PRR Progress Party in Norway has the highest share of negative partisanship of all parties in the system. Novel analysis of open-ended responses reveal that negative partisans react against both the party's policies and rhetorical style. The analysis reveals that negative partisans mirror voters of the PRR only to some extent. Notably, they emphasize disagreements with the party's views on humanity, and with environmental and economic policies. Political style is also a considerable source of negative PRR partisanship and is more important to account for never voting than to account for the support for these parties. The findings underscore that the study of negative partisanship contributes to a fuller account of patterns of PRR electoral performance and particularly its limitations.     

The Electoral Effectiveness of Party Organization: Norway, 1945–1977*

Latent Variable Partial Least Squares analysis has been used to model the impact of political party organization on stable and changing patterns of party vote in Norway from 1945 to 1977. For the Norwegian Labor Party, the elaboration of a strategy of organizational encapsulation is at least as important as the economic base for maintaining the stability of the party's electoral support; it also depresses support for the opposition parties. Short-run fluctuations around the long-run stability, however, are more influence by economic changes than party organizational strategies, with the exception of the divisive 1973 election, when party organization was important for maintaining the party vote. For the non-Labor parties, party organization is less important than economic variables.     

Policy Responsiveness and Incumbent Reelection in State Legislatures

Does policy responsiveness on the part of incumbent legislators affect their prospects for reelection? Recent studies of congressional campaigns demonstrate that incumbents who support policies that are more congruent with their constituents' preferences face fewer reelection obstacles. The present analysis considers this question in state legislative elections where voter knowledge of legislator activities is generally quite low. The findings demonstrate that incumbents positioned farther from the average citizen and toward their party's base are only slightly more likely to be challenged than other incumbents. However, more partisan voting incumbents do attract challengers capable of raising and spending larger amounts of money. Interestingly, incumbents positioned closer to their party's base actually receive a greater share of the vote in most contested elections. Only when challengers spend significant amounts of money do we see the positive effects of partisan voting by incumbents diminished. Overall, these findings demonstrate the mechanisms by which policy positions of incumbents in a low‐information environment affect the challengers that emerge and the level of voter support received.     

How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013–2017

Until 2017, Germany was an exception to the success of radical right parties in postwar Europe. We provide new evidence for the transformation of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to a radical right party drawing upon social media data. Further, we demonstrate that the AfD's electorate now matches the radical right template of other countries and that its trajectory mirrors the ideological shift of the party. Using data from the 2013 to 2017 series of German Longitudinal Elections Study (GLES) tracking polls, we employ multilevel modelling to test our argument on support for the AfD. We find the AfD's support now resembles the image of European radical right voters. Specifically, general right-wing views and negative attitudes towards immigration have become the main motivation to vote for the AfD. This, together with the increased salience of immigration and the AfD's new ideological profile, explains the party's rise.     

How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia

Political parties in sub-Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using postwar Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties' ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party's electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel farther to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater.     

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.     

Distinguishing territorial structure from electoral adventurism: The distinct sources of static and dynamic nationalization

Estimates of static nationalization do not always reflect stark qualitative differences between parties. We use a research design oriented around a comparison of sharply different parties—the unstable Democratic Left in Ecuador and the stable Broad Front in Uruguay—to develop the distinctiveness of static and dynamic nationalization. Snapshot measures that only consider a single election suggest that both parties are poorly statically nationalized; but we show that the former case is highly statically nationalized, and that the observed territorial differences arise because it is poorly dynamically nationalized. We adopt the linear mixed modeling approach to reduce the bias in extant estimators. The approach is also informative about the sources of variance in a party's territorial support: relatively stable district attributes account for static nationalization, while features unique to the electoral cycle account for dynamic nationalization. Substantively, our study alters conclusions about parties operating in highly unstable electoral contexts.     

Pauline Hanson and the Rise and Fall of the Radical Right in Australia

Abstract

In this paper Deutchman examines the rise and fall of the radical right in the late 1990s in Australia. In particular, she focuses on the rise and fall of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. In 1996 an obscure backbencher named Pauline Hanson was elected to the federal parliament. From the moment she made her first speech in September of that year she was rarely off the nation's front pages. By April 1997 she started her own political party, One Nation. By July 1998 her party was able to win an astonishing 23 per cent of the vote in the Queensland state election. And by October 1998 she lost her own seat in Parliament and saw her party's fortunes decline. Deutchman examines various theories which have attempted to explain the rise of radical-right parties in Europe and the United States in order to understand the Australian case. Notably, she argues that the convergence of the two major parties, the Coalition and the Australian Labor Party, provides the setting in which the emergence of a radical-right party becomes more likely. Such a party often emerges when the two major parties are centre-right ones, as is the case in Australia. In most countries research has shown that it is difficult for a radical-right party to do well nationally. Indeed, this has been true in Australia. Despite the fact that One Nation has lost much of its electoral support, Deutchman argues that it is premature to write off the radical right in Australia.     

Forecasting the 2015 general election using aggregate local election data

Local government election results are used to estimate a national equivalent vote that provides the basis for a general election forecast. By-elections provide the means for calculating weighted quarterly averages of national support. These show trends similar to those obtained by national polls. By-election results in the three month period leading to the general election contribute towards the national vote share calculation and seat distributions are determined by uniform national swing. Additionally, results from the main council elections from 2011 onwards are aggregated to the parliamentary constituency level and used to estimate each party's relative performance in key target seats. This information is used to fine-tune the final seat forecast which suggests a hung parliament is the most likely outcome.     

Do parties perceive their voter potentials correctly? Reconsidering the spatial logic of electoral competition

Political parties strive for maximizing their vote shares. One way to achieve this goal is to attract voters from competitors. A precondition for strategies aiming at attracting these voters is that parties perceive their voter potentials among their rivals' electorates correctly. Yet, hardly anything is known about such perceptions. To fill this gap, we develop analogue measures of a party's perceived and its actual voter potential for each competitor in a party system. Combining elite and mass surveys conducted in Germany, we show that perceived and actual voter potentials depend on spatial considerations but also that not all parties are able to correctly evaluate their potentials. These deviations can be traced back to differences in the perceived placement of political actors between elites and citizens. This supports the spatial logic of party competition but it also points to potential pitfalls for strategic behavior of political parties.     

Party nationalization in a multilevel context: Where's the variance?

We use estimates of variance in district-level electoral data as a way to identify multiple dimensions of the nationalization of party support, including “static nationalization” and “dynamic nationalization.” The multilevel model we use—also described as a random coefficient, mixed, growth curve, and hierarchical model—yields estimates of a party's mean national trajectory of electoral support (fixed effects), as well as estimates of variability around the mean trajectory parameters (random effects). Using a general model, we present a two-step approach to first identify electoral variability and then account for it. We develop the model, apply it to three political parties, demonstrate its behavior under controlled conditions using data we create, and demonstrate its application for explanatory purposes.     

It's coming from inside the House (of Commons): Agenda control,accountability, and interest group lobbying in majoritarian parliaments

In majoritarian parliaments, the executive branch typically enjoys an informational advantage over the legislature. In theory, legislators can reduce this asymmetry with information from interest groups. In practice, the government is almost always better informed than the legislature. This article develops a model whereby a politician's access to outside information depends not just on her parliamentary power but on the diffusion of legislative agenda control among political parties—for example, during minority government. Using a new panel data set of 41,619 lobbying communications, it finds interest groups are more likely to communicate with government frontbenchers than with opposition or backbench members. This gap diminishes as agenda control diffuses to opposition parties. It also finds evidence of partisan clustering in lobbying networks during majority government. Strong legislative parties weaken accountability by restricting access to outside information, but this is conditional on the governing party's control over the agenda.     

Voter perceptions of coalition policy positions in multiparty systems

A growing body of research shows how voters consider coalition formation and policy compromises at the post-electoral stage when making vote choices. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how voters perceive policy positions of coalition governments. Using new survey data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), we study voter perceptions of coalition policy platforms. We find that voters do in general have reasonable expectations of the coalitions' policy positions. However, partisan beliefs and uncertainty affect how voters perceive coalition positions: in addition to projection biases similar to those for individual party placements, partisans of coalition parties tend to align the position of the coalition with their own party's policy position, especially for those coalitions they prefer the most. In contrast, there is no consistent effect of political knowledge on the voters' uncertainty when evaluating coalition policy positions.     

Nationalisation of multilevel party systems: A conceptual and empirical analysis

The concept of ‘nationalisation’ is vigorously discussed in the literature and three dimensions have been proposed. A first dimension considers the extent to which a party's vote in territorial units varies across time and this is labeled ‘dynamic nationalisation’. ‘Distributional nationalisation’ focuses on the degree to which there is an equal distribution of party votes across territorial units. Finally, ‘party‐linkage nationalisation’ concerns the extent to which candidates link together under common party labels. In addition to a conceptual debate there has been a simultaneous debate on the measurement of the various forms of nationalisation. This article contributes to both debates and argues that most of the literature on nationalisation suffers from a methodological nationalism bias – that is, the tendency of many scholars to choose the statewide level and national election as the natural unit of analysis. This claim is supported by a conceptual and empirical analysis regarding the effects of decentralisation on nationalisation. The conceptual analysis shows that the non‐robust findings of many studies concerning the effects of decentralisation on nationalisation can be related to the methodological nationalism bias. An effect of decentralisation is found once nationalisation is conceptualised with regard to its multilevel dimension and the measurements of nationalisation are differentiated according to parties, regions and type of elections (national or regional). An empirical analysis on the nationalisation of party systems, parties and regions in 18 countries for national and regional elections held between 1945 and 2009 shows that regional authority has a significant and robust effect on regions and regional elections but not on parties, party systems and national vote shares.     

The Cube Rule in a Mixed Electoral System: Disproportionality in German Bundestag Elections

In the German mixed electoral system the PR tier is generally perceived as fully compensating for any disproportionality in the vote–seat translation generated by the plurality tier. However, as this article shows, the PR tier can itself increase disproportionality. In a mixed electoral system, small parties enter (hopeless) district races with the hope of boosting their PR vote share. But with a high number of district parties, parties may win districts at levels way below the usual 50 per cent vote share threshold. Looking at all 16 Bundestag elections from 1953 to 2009, the article identifies the effective number of district parties as a very strong predictor for the disproportional translation of votes into seats in the plurality tier of Germany's mixed electoral system. The article points to consequences for the internal composition of parliamentary parties, for parties' nomination strategies and for the occurrence of so-called overhang mandates.     

National versus European: Party Control over Members of the European Parliament

This article examines different strategies of national governmental parties to influence ‘their’ Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), posing the following questions: Do national parties try to control voting behaviour of their MEPs? And do control mechanisms enhance the probability that an MEP toes a national party line rather than following his or her European party group? The analysis reveals differences between individual parties, indicating that at least some national parties actively attempt to control their MEPs. Furthermore, the article evaluates the success of the various approaches, taking compliance with the position of the minister in the Council as a benchmark. The results show that the overall effect of control mechanisms remains small. Instead of toeing the line of their national party's minister, MEPs tend to vote with their European group.     

How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change

Considerable ambiguity exists regarding the effect of government/opposition status on party platform change. Existing theories predict that (1) it has no effect, (2) opposition parties change more, (3) opposition parties change more after several spells in opposition, and (4) parties’ responses vary because of different goal orientations. We propose that a party's aspiration to office, measured by its historical success or failure in entering office, determines a party's reaction to being in opposition or government. We hypothesize that, because of loss aversion, parties with low office aspiration change more when they are in government than when they are in opposition. Conversely, parties with high office aspiration change more as opposition party than as government party. We find evidence for these hypotheses through a pooled time‐series cross‐sectional analysis of 1,686 platform changes in 21 democracies, using the Comparative Manifesto Data and an innovative measure of party platform change.     

Is there an incumbency advantage or cost of ruling in proportional election systems?

This paper investigates the effects of political representation on electoral outcomes at the party and coalition levels in proportional election systems using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation, namely, to hold seats and to belong to the ruling coalition. I refer to the effect of the former as the incumbency effect and the effect of the latter as the ruling effect. The discontinuous variation in the seat share as the vote share varies for parties is used to isolate exogenous variation in incumbency. The discontinuous variation in ruling at the 50% seat share cutoff for coalitions is used in order to exogenous variation in ruling. I find that incumbency determines the distribution of 12% of the total vote, which is similar to the advantage found in majoritarian systems. I find no ruling effect, contrary to the commonly found cost of ruling in proportional systems.     

Do Voters Respond to Party Manifestos or to a Wider Information Environment? An Analysis of Mass‐Elite Linkages on European Integration

Recent studies analyze how citizens update their perceptions of parties’ left‐right positions in response to new political information. We extend this research to consider the issue of European integration, and we report theoretical and empirical analyses that citizens do not update their perceptions of parties’ positions in response to election manifestos, but that citizens’ perceptions of parties’ positions do track political experts’ perceptions of these positions, and, moreover, that it is party supporters who disproportionately perceive their preferred party's policy shifts. Given that experts plausibly consider a wide range of information, these findings imply that citizens weigh the wider informational environment when assessing parties’ positions. We also present evidence that citizens’ perceptions of party position shifts matter, in that they drive partisan sorting in the mass public.     

Seat share distribution of parties: Models and empirical patterns

We find that strategic sequencing and other factors sort parties roughly into two groups. Low-ranking parties lose part of their inherent support, compared to probabilistic expectations, while high-ranking parties profit from the shift. Our method is to graph the worldwide mean seat shares of parties at various ranks by size against the largest party share (Nagayama triangle format). The resulting empirical pattern looks complex, yet when we adjust a probabilistic model to account for strategic and other factors that may hurt the smaller parties, the fit becomes close. The number of parties that profit from transfers is close to the inverse of the fractional share of the largest party. The model fits best when the transfer is assumed to involve about one-half of inherent minor party support. This is a novel way to estimate the universal average strength of strategic and other factors that work against the smaller parties. The empirical worldwide mean pattern offers us a norm against which seat share distributions in individual countries or single elections can be compared.