Election observer effects: A field experiment in the Russian Duma election of 2011

The literature on elections and election monitoring is divided between those who take a skeptical view, suggesting that monitors are often political rather than objective in their judgments, and those who see monitors as a real force for cleaner, more honest elections. Studies that use field experiments to look for the effect of monitors generally support the optimists, indicating that the mere presence of election observers can have powerful effects. This is surprising given the extent of the resources available to incumbents who wish to conduct electoral fraud. We present the results of an experiment in which 768 observers were randomly assigned to polling stations in 21 cities in Russia in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Unlike most previous studies of election observers, our results suggest that observer effects on turnout and vote for the ruling party are small. The results suggest the need to study more carefully the circumstances that shape the impact of observation missions.     

Critical election and a new party system: Italy after the 2015 regional election

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical.     

Split ticket voting in the 1995 Russian Duma elections

High levels of split ticket voting in elections usually indicate either an instrumental electorate, or widespread disaffection from the major parties. Elections to the Russian lower house, the Duma, permit voters both party list options and single-member ballots; as a result, the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections recorded some of the highest levels of split ticket voting ever recorded. Using national survey data collected just after the 1995 Duma election, we test two major explanations for split ticket voting, one based on the activities of voters, the other on the strategic behaviour of parties. The results show that split ticket voting is caused by voters, and more specifically, by their weak attachments to parties. But party strategy also plays a modest role in promoting the phenomenon. In the absence of major reform of the Russian electoral system, split ticket voting is likely to remain at high levels.     

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.     

Small winners and big losers: strategic party behaviour in the 2017 Dutch general election

Abstract

This article analyses party strategies during the campaign for the Dutch general election of March 2017, making use of issue-yield theory. It investigates whether parties strategically emphasise high-yield issues, by juxtaposing the issue opportunities provided by voters with parties’ issue emphasis during the campaign. More specifically, it asks whether parties strategically emphasised issues that were expected to reward them electorally. Analysing voter preferences and party campaign data, it is found that parties and most of their constituencies show high ideological consistency, that parties emphasise mostly positional issues and thus choose a conflict-mobilising strategy, and that most parties emphasise high-yield issues rather than following the general political agenda. Four small parties that won significantly behaved strategically while the social democrats – who severely lost – hardly did. The findings imply that the issue-yield framework can help to explain the election result in the fragmented Dutch multi-party context.     

Doomed to Defeat? Electoral Support and the Conservative Party

This article recaps the main trends in public opinion and electoral support for the Conservative party since the last general election in June 2001 by examining the overall polling data relating to party popularity. The article also considers by-elections, local elections and leadership change, as well as the most recent elections in 2004. The various challenges the party faces as it attempts to position itself as a credible alternative government to the Labour party under Tony Blair are considered.
Given the clear biases of the electoral system used for the House of Commons, which are certain to benefit Labour substantially even if the Conservatives get close to them in terms of overall vote share, or indeed even overtake them, it still seems unlikely that such success will be sufficient to achieve much more than to reduce Tony Blair's House of Commons majority in 2005.     

A party system in flux: the Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018

In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party system was transformed.     

European integration and electoral democracy: How the European Union constrains party competition in the Member States

The assignment of policy competencies to the European Union has reduced the divergence of party policy positions nationally, leaving the electorate with fewer policy options. Building upon insights from spatial proximity theories of party competition, the convergence argument predicts convergence particularly in policy domains with increasing EU competence. As the policy commitments that derive from EU membership increase, parties become more constrained in terms of the feasible policy alternative they can implement when in office. The analysis uses manifesto data at the country‐party system level for nine policy domains. It uses ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation with country fixed effects, a lagged dependent variable and country corrected standard errors. Controlling for other factors that could plausibly explain policy convergence, the models also assess whether the convergent effect of party positions varies across different types of parties. The main finding is that in policy domains where the involvement of the EU has increased, the distance between parties' positions tends to decrease. The constraining impact of EU policy decisions differs between Member and non‐Member States. This effect is more apparent for the policy agendas of larger, mainstream and pro‐EU parties in the Member States.     

Appearing moderate or radical? Radical left party success and the two-dimensional political space

Abstract

Challenger parties’ electoral successes have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Based on the example of West European radical left parties, this article investigates whether and how centripetal and centrifugal positional movements on different conflict dimensions influence the election results of these parties. Depending on parties’ issue-linkages, these strategies will have a different effect for the economic and the non-economic issue dimension. Due to radical left parties’ long-term commitment and a strong party-issue linkage on economic issues, more moderate positions will play to their electoral advantage. In contrast, far-left parties compete with social democratic and green-libertarian parties for party-issue linkages on the non-economic issue dimension. Here, they benefit from promoting centrifugal strategies. Based on time-series cross-section analyses for 25 West European far-left parties between 1990 and 2017, the empirical results show that the success of radical left parties’ positional strategies varies with the conflict dimension in question and that this effect is only partly moderated by the positions of competing mainstream left parties.     

The verdict in the polls: how government stability is affected by popular support

The idea that the stability of governments is affected by how they are performing in the polls is both intuitive and popular in the literature. When support is low the government might be inclined to replace parties or the prime minister in order to regain support, thus forming a replacement government. Alternatively, a government doing well in the polls might opportunistically try to schedule an early election to capitalise on its favourable prospects. But despite the popularity of the idea, it has thus far not been tested empirically whether government stability is in fact influenced by popular support. This article aims to address this lacuna. Using a relatively new dataset with more than 12,000 unique polls, and recently developed Bayesian models for pooling the polls, it is here shown that government stability is in fact impacted by popular support. Governments display clear signs of electoral opportunism when they are polling well and, conversely, dissolve the government, without calling an election, when polling is bad. The results are strongest when there are few parties in the government, since agreement on the timing for a discretionary termination is easier when fewer players need to agree.     

Steady State or Second Order? The 2003 Elections to the National Assembly for Wales

This article examines the second National Assembly for Wales election in May 2003. It focuses on the campaign and results, examining the relationship between the process and dynamics of devolution, and identifiable significant shifts in Welsh politics. It compares the 2003 results with those in the first election in 1999 and isolates a number of phenomena, such as turnout and support for the parties most closely associated with the region, that help establish whether the second election signals a return to 'traditional' voting or whether there remains a pattern associated with so-called 'second order' ballots.     

Changes in the menu of manipulation: Electoral fraud,ballot stuffing,and voter pressure in the 2011 Russian election

Vote-buying and voter intimidation are costly, complicated, and risky ways to manage elections. Why, then, do hybrid regimes utilize such tactics rather than ballot stuffing or election falsification? Such methods to mobilize voters require the construction of patronage networks that can be used to mobilize or demobilize clients beyond the election, and to display the incumbent's organizational strength. These networks are most valuable in places where opposition groups are active; consequently direct voter pressure should be more common in competitive areas. This paper uses data from Russia's 83 regions during the 2011 election to compare patterns of extra-legal mobilization with patterns of ballot stuffing and falsification. I conclude that local political competitiveness structures the mix of electoral manipulation tactics employed.     

Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.     

The survival and termination of party mergers in Europe

Why do constituent parties that participated in a party merger that was intended to be permanent decide to leave the merger to re‐enter party competition separately? To address this question, merger termination is conceptualised in this article as an instance of new party formation, coalition termination and institutionalisation failure. Building on this conceptualisation, three sets of factors are presented that account for which mergers are likely to be terminated by constituent parties and which are not. To test these three sets of hypotheses, a mixed‐methods design is used. First, survival analysis is applied to a new dataset on the performance of mergers in 21 European democracies during the postwar period. The findings support hypotheses derived from a conception of merger termination as new party formation: pre‐ and post‐merger legislative performance significantly affect the probability of merger termination. Furthermore, the institutionalisation of constituent parties helps to sustain mergers if the latter already built trust in pre‐merger cooperation, in line with the conception of merger termination as institutionalisation failure. Two theory‐confirming case studies are then analysed: one case of merger survival and the other of termination. These case studies substantiate the working of the significant variables identified in the large‐N analysis that drove the selection of case studies. They also reveal how mediating factors difficult to capture in large‐N designs help to account for why factors that – theoretically – should have complicated the working of the ‘survival case’, and should have been beneficial to the ‘termination case’, did not generate the expected effects.     

The 2017 regional elections in Slovakia: Soaring independents and recovered opposition in a fragmented political space

ABSTRACT

Government parties suffered defeat in the November 2017 regional elections in Slovakia. The Direction-Social Democracy (Smer), the senior coalition partner, managed to remain the party with the largest share of elected regional deputies. However, its strength was significantly reduced, both when compared to the 2016 national elections and the 2013 regional contests. The democratic center-right opposition managed to coordinate and compete effectively against the governing parties. Its success was apparent in the gubernatorial contests, where its candidates defeated most of the Smer-backed incumbents. The democratic opposition was less successful in elections to regional assemblies. Their most significant result is a dramatic increase in the share of independent deputies who constitute the largest virtual group of deputies.     

Marginalisation or legitimation? Mainstream party positioning on immigration and support for radical right parties

Abstract

Does mainstream party positioning contribute to marginalising or legitimising niche party positions? This article argues that voter perceptions of the legitimacy and credibility of niche party positions play a role in individuals’ propensity to vote for niche parties. It finds that the adoption of more restrictive immigration positions by mainstream parties increases the likelihood that those people who do not recognise the issue competence of radical right parties on immigration will vote radical right. However, for individuals who already perceive the radical right to be competent on immigration, mainstream party adoption of more restrictive immigration positions has no effect on propensity to vote radical right. In addition, the increase in the propensity of individuals to vote radical right is predominantly a function of mainstream left parties adopting more restrictive immigration positions. These results imply that mainstream parties risk fuelling radical right party support by adopting more restrictive immigration positions.     

Big expectations, small outcomes: The impact of leaders' personal appeal in the 2004 Greek election

The 2004 Greek election provides an interesting case study for examining the impact of party leaders on the vote. A change in governing party leadership a few months before polling day had two important implications. First, it generated a highly favourable context for the emergence of decisive leadership effects. Second, it made it feasible to grasp empirically how voters form their evaluations of new leaders. Regarding the first question, the findings indicate that even in the most favourable environment the impact of leadership evaluations on the overall electoral outcome is only slight. Regarding the second, it seems that the change of leader at the start of an election campaign can be a mixed blessing. Whereas it can help a party to divert media and public focus from other less favourable issues, the party pays a corresponding price when its new leader has to learn the job in the full glare of an election campaign.     

The September 2015 Regional Elections in Russia: A Rehearsal for Next Year's National Legislative Races

The September 2015 elections in the regions of Russia resulted in victories for the major pro-government party, United Russia, in 11 regional legislative elections and brought success to incumbent chief executives in 21 gubernatorial elections. The performance of United Russia was better than in the previous series of regional elections, which is particularly important given that in many respects, the 2015 regional elections served as a rehearsal for the 2016 national legislative races. The results of the elections generally attested to the efficiency of political and institutional manipulation tools developed by the Russian authorities in recent years.     

The Coalition and the Decline of Majoritarianism in the UK

The United Kingdom has traditionally featured many aspects of the majoritarian model of democracy: its first‐past‐the‐post electoral system tends towards producing single‐party majorities, while its legislative decision rules concentrate policy‐making power in the hands of the resulting single‐party governments. However, in an unprecedented break with the UK's postwar conventions, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition following the general election of 2010. In this article, we examine some of the Coalition's impacts on governing and constitutional conventions, placing them in a comparative European context. We conclude that the Coalition reflects a shift towards the less majoritarian forms of politics prevalent in continental Europe, and that some of these changes are likely to persist even after the end of the current government.     

The electoral victory of the NPD in Saxony and the prospects for future extreme-right success in German elections

ABSTRACT

Largely because of Germany's traumatic experience of National Socialism, German extreme right-wing parties have remained a marginal post-war political phenomenon. The spectacular electoral victory of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) in the Saxon parliamentary elections of September 2004 (9.2 per cent of the vote) nurtured the fear that a far-right party could establish itself at the national level. Backes explains the election victory by relating it to a set of Saxon and Eastern German circumstances. He demonstrates that unfavourable conditions, which have so far prevented the establishment of extreme right-wing parties at the national level, still prevail. Against this background, he shows that the NPD's capacity for taking advantage of advantageous conditions (like economic problems and xenophobia, rampant in some places) reaches its limits very quickly.