Coping with a two-dimensional political space: Party mobilisation in referendums on European integration

European Union referendums invite national electorates to vote on transnational cooperation and regional integration, thereby creating tension between transnational ballot issues and domestic electoral mobilisation. Because of the tension, domestic political parties are forced to confront a two-dimensional political space in EU referendums. In the referendum-generated political space, unless integration issues are more salient than domestic concerns, intra-divided and inter-converged mainstream parties tend strategically to abstain from the campaigns. Yet, explicit inter-party collusion may allow the pro-integration mainstream to form a party cartel in EU referendums. Suggestive evidence is drawn from a case study of the two Irish referendums on the Nice Treaty. Based on a party-candidate survey, Irish parties are mapped onto a latent two-dimensional political space. The findings shed new light on the initial abstention of Irish mainstream parties in the first Nice campaign and their subsequent mobilisation in the second referendum.     

Bargaining in legislatures,portfolio allocation,and the electoral costs of governing

What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price – the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions.     

The Liberal Democrat Dilemma in Historical Perspective

This article examines Liberal and later Liberal Democrat relationships with other parties, whether through pacts (either electoral or parliamentary) or pursuing realignment. It shows how dilemmas that the Liberal Democrats may face in the future over what to do in a hung parliament have been a constant theme in Liberal politics since the electoral cooperation with Labour in 1906 and the parliamentary arrangement with Irish nationalists in 1910. It then argues that since 1918 the Liberals have been divided between those who were sympathetic to pacts and arrangements with other parties and those who feared compromising their independence. However, it is argued that Liberals fearful of a loss of independence were never able to offer a really effective answer as to how they could succeed in exerting political influence without cooperation. This remains a live debate for the Liberal Democrats.     

Party competition over decentralisation: The influence of ideology and electoral incentives on issue emphasis

Under what conditions is decentralisation a salient issue for state‐wide political parties? It is argued in this article that the extent to which state‐wide parties emphasise decentralisation depends on their strategic considerations: on their overall ideology, on the electoral incentives created by the context in which they compete, and on the interaction between the two. The results of the analysis of party manifestos in 31 countries since 1945 are as follows. First, parties that pay greater attention to cultural matters relative to economic matters tend to talk more about decentralisation. Second, the systemic salience of decentralisation also encourages parties to talk more about decentralisation. Third, the larger the regionally based ethnic groups within a country, the more salience all state‐wide political parties will attach to decentralisation. Finally, only parties that put greater relative emphasis on cultural matters tend to respond to the electoral threat of regionalist parties. The influence of territorial diversity on the salience of decentralisation thus works through two channels and is partly conditioned by political parties’ ideological profile.     

Electoral entry and success of ethnic minority parties in central and eastern Europe: A hierarchical selection model

The paper examines determinants of electoral entry and success of ethnic minority parties in central and eastern Europe. The application of a hierarchical selection model shows that the strategic entry of minority parties depends on their expected electoral success due both to observed and unobserved factors. Drawing on formal models of electoral entry, the electoral success of new (or niche) parties is expected to be influenced by the costs of entry (determined by electoral thresholds) and the potential for electoral support. The latter depends on the reactions of political competitors and electoral demand, measured here as the size of ethnic groups and the saliency of ethnic issues. In line with these expectations, parties only run if they can expect electoral support sufficient to pass the electoral threshold. This finding would have been overlooked by a naïve model of electoral success which does not take self-selection into account.     

Are higher-magnitude electoral districts always better for small parties?

High-magnitude electoral districts are widely believed to lead to greater representation for smaller parties. This article refines the conventional wisdom by taking electoral geography into account. When small political parties have geographically concentrated support bases, then no systematic relationship exists between district magnitude and legislative representation. High-magnitude districts do not advantage small parties whose supporters are geographically concentrated. Evidence in support of this claim comes from India and Israel. The article shows what counterfactual Indian and Israeli legislatures would look like if seats were allocated using electoral districts of varying magnitudes and highlights how parties with geographically concentrated support bases win similar seat totals, irrespective of district magnitude.     

Endogenous ballot structures: The selection of open and closed lists in Colombia’s legislative elections

What are the incentives for parties to personalize electoral competition? This paper proposes that both open and closed lists give congruity, rather than tension, to the interests of party leaders and candidates. However, the efficacy of each list type depends on the electoral returns expected from promoting the partisan and personal vote. To test this argument, we analyze the choices of parties over the ballot structure by leveraging an unusual institutional feature of the Colombian legislative elections, wherein parties are allowed to present either an open or a closed list, varying their choices across electoral districts and contests. Our empirical analysis shows that parties are more likely to open their lists in high-magnitude districts and wherever they have a strong, local electoral organization. We also find a positive relationship between the selection of closed lists among personalist parties, providing evidence to previous arguments proposing a closed list as a tool to concentrate campaign efforts behind a particular candidate.     

Poverty and Divine Rewards: The Electoral Advantage of Islamist Political Parties

Political life in many Muslim‐majority countries has been marked by the electoral dominance of Islamist parties. Recent attempts to explain why have highlighted their material and organizational factors, such as the provision of social services. In this article, we revive an older literature that emphasizes the appeal of these parties’ religious nature to voters experiencing economic hardship. Individuals suffering economic strain may vote for Islamists because they believe this to be an intrinsically virtuous act that will be met with divine rewards in the afterlife. We explore this hypothesis through a series of laboratory experiments in Tunisia. Individuals assigned to treatment conditions instilling feelings of economic strain exhibit greater support for Islamist parties, and this support is causally mediated by an expectation of divine compensation in the hereafter. The evidence suggests that the religious nature of Islamist parties may thus be an important factor in their electoral success.     

Proportional Representation and the Fortunes of Right-Wing Extremist Parties

This article examines the relationship between electoral systems and extremist political parties. Focusing on the West European parties of the extreme right, it first investigates the extent to which district magnitude and electoral formula - the two main dimensions of electoral systems - influence the scores of these parties. It then considers the overall impact of the disproportionality of the electoral system. The article concludes that whilst proportional electoral systems do undeniably make it easier for extremist parties to gain legislative representation, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that they promote extremism. Instead, the share of the vote going to extremist parties appears unrelated to the type of electoral system employed.     

Trying not to lose: The electoral consequences of unilateral reform efforts and the social pact formation process

The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.     

Adapting to closed-list proportional representation: lessons from Ukraine

This paper examines the implications of Ukraine’s move from a mixed electoral system to one of proportional representation in the 2006 parliamentary elections. In particular, it seeks to understand how the elimination of district contests affected the two major parties’ strategies in selecting candidates. Two strategies are outlined: prioritizing inclusion and prioritizing cohesion. Under the former, parties co-opt unaffiliated district deputies to improve their electoral fortunes despite potential costs to party discipline. The latter involves parties selecting affiliated deputies on the expectation of greater loyalty if elected. The analysis reveals that while the ruling party, Our Ukraine, employed a cautious version of inclusion, its opponent, the Party of Regions, emphasized cohesion. The findings show that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to how parties react to the introduction of list-only systems. Furthermore, given the greater subsequent success of The Party of Regions in gaining office, the results question the degree to which ruling parties benefit electorally from greater inclusion when responding to the advent of more proportional electoral rules.     

Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties’ perceived unity as well as competence in the policy-making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties’ performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties’ record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties’ electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties’ electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests’ timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes.     

Duverger's Law, Penrose's Power Index and the Unity of the UK

As predicted by Duverger's Law, the UK has had two-party competition for long periods in most electoral districts. However, there are different patterns of two-party competition in different districts and more than two effective parties in the Commons. Since 1874, parliament has always contained parties wishing to modify the Union and contesting seats only outside England. By calculating the Penrose power index for all parties in the House of Commons for all general elections since 1874, we identify when such parties were pivotal. We explain various legislative changes (for example the Crofters Act 1886, the first three Irish Home Rule Bills, the Parliament Act 1911) and non-changes (for example the failure to enact female suffrage before 1914) by reference to the Penrose index scores. The scores also explain how and why policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland changed and did not change in the 1970s.     

Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties

This article examines the relationship between Christian religiosity and the support for radical right parties in Western Europe. Drawing on theories of electoral choice and on socio-psychological literature largely ignored by scholars of electoral behaviour, it suggests and tests a number of competing hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that while religiosity has few direct effects, and while religious people are neither more nor less hostile towards ethnic minorities and thereby neither more nor less prone to vote for a radical right party, they are not ‘available’ to these parties because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties. However, given increasing de-alignment, this ‘vaccine effect’ is likely to become weaker with time.     

How programmatic profiles of niche parties affect their electoral performance

Previous studies on the electoral performance of niche parties have not fully taken into account the evolutionary aspect of the programmatic profiles of these parties, although the majority of these parties were analysed from when they first came into existence, as new parties. Acknowledging the variation in programmatic profiles between niche parties and over time, the article argues that the electoral effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration as programmatic features of niche parties vary over their lifecycle. When entering the electoral arena, niche parties benefit from high levels of nicheness and programmatic concentration. However, these positive effects decrease as parties grow older and face different challenges to those of their early days. The empirical analysis of green and extreme right parties in this article supports the corresponding hypotheses. Results show that the positive effects of nicheness and programmatic concentration vanish over time and indicate niche parties’ own influence on their electoral destiny.     

Third party decline in the UK: The SNP and SDP in comparative perspective

The failure of ‘third’ parties to displace their larger rivals is a consistent (although not universal) feature of competitive democracies which have simple majority electoral systems. It is argued that there are structural features intrinsic to most third parties which tend to accelerate the process of decline once it has set in. Because of their reliance on individual members, these parties put great stress on individual participation and provide the opportunities for it. As a result, they are particularly subject to the effects of internal competition which electoral decline is likely to intensify. The study tests this hypothesis by looking at two cases of third party decline, and concludes that the mass branch party format is ill‐able to cope with electoral failure.     

Income inequality,electoral systems and party polarisation

This study analyses why income inequality and party polarisation proceed together in some countries but not in others. By focusing on the relationship between income inequality, the permissiveness of electoral systems and party polarisation, the study offers a theoretical explanation for how the combination of income inequality and permissive electoral systems generates higher party polarisation. After analysing a cross‐national dataset of party polarisation, income inequality and electoral institutions covering 24 advanced democracies between 1960 and 2011, it is found that a simple correlation between income inequality and party polarisation is not strong. However, the empirical results indicate that greater income inequality under permissive electoral systems contributes to growing party polarisation, which suggests that parties only have diverging ideological platforms due to greater income inequality when electoral systems encourage their moves towards the extreme; parties do not diverge when electoral systems discourage their moves towards the extreme.     

Ideology matters: Why decentralisation has a differentiated effect on regionalist parties' fortunes in Western democracies

This article addresses the effects of decentralisation reforms on regionalist parties' electoral strength. It takes up the debate between ‘accommodatists’ (i.e., electoral loss due to policy accommodation) and ‘institutionalists’ (i.e., electoral gain due to institutional empowerment). These effects depend on the electoral venue considered – regional or national – and on the ideological radicalism of a given regionalist party – secessionist or autonomist. This study finds that increases in the level of decentralisation are positively associated with higher scores for autonomist parties in regional elections, while they are not statistically significantly correlated with secessionist parties' electoral performances. In contrast, in national elections, decentralisation reforms seem to penalise autonomist parties more than secessionist ones. These findings are based on the analysis of a novel dataset which includes regional and national vote shares for 77 regionalist parties in 11 Western democracies from 1950 until 2010.     

Ideological congruence between party rhetoric and policy-making

Scholars, citizens and journalists alike question whether political parties keep their electoral promises. A growing body of literature provides empirical evidence that parties do indeed keep their electoral pledges. Yet little is known about the congruence between party rhetoric between elections and the policies delivered by them. Given the increasing influence of party rhetoric in the media with respect to voting decisions, it is highly relevant to understand if parties ‘walk like they talk’. The article suggests that due to electoral reasons parties face strong incentives to deliver policy outputs which are congruent to their daily rhetoric. Analysing data on 54 policy outputs on nuclear energy, drafted by 24 parties after the Fukushima accident, the analysis finds overwhelming evidence that parties deliver ideologically congruent policy outputs to their rhetoric (incongruent only in 7.89%). These findings have important implications for our understanding of the linkage between party communication and the masses in modern media democracies.