Electoral Reform as an Engine of Party System Change in Italy

Abstract

After more than forty years of proportional representation, in 1991 Italy embarked on a period of electoral law revision. The ongoing debate about how to engineer an electoral system capable of producing the preferred political outcomes stands out against the stasis in constitutional reform, most recently demonstrated in the rejection by popular referendum of Matteo Renzi’s package of reforms. The extent to which the different electoral reforms have had an impact on Italian politics, especially following the 2005 electoral legislation, can be evaluated by analysing the changing Italian party system over the past decade and beyond in terms of its morphology, dynamics, and party/parliamentary group switching. The 2005 electoral reform has had a clear effect on Italian politics and on the party system, but that effect is unlikely to endure given the highly controversial new electoral law that came into force in 2017.     

Competition and Coalescence in European Party Systems: Social Democracy and Christian Democracy Moving into the 21st Century

Party systems in Europe have been in transition since the 1990s. New parties have emerged and appear more successful in gaining representation in parliament and government than before. Conversely the established party families in many postwar West European party systems ‐ Social Democracy and Christian Democracy in particular ‐ seem to have lost ground. We argue that an ideological convergence is developing between these two party families towards the ‘centre of gravity’ of their respective party systems. This may help to explain why ‘new’ parties of the Left and the Right have competed more successfully since the 1990s: they have bypassed Social and Christian Democratic parties in terms of both Left/Right and Progressive/Conservative dimensions and differences. These developments are explored by analysing party programmes. It appears that many Social and Christian Democratic parties are indeed often moving closer to each other. In fact, we conclude that being in the centre of a party system or in government is hardly an electoral asset any more in most West European polities.     

Agribusiness,Legislative Elections and Party Fragmentation in Brazil

The article explores the impact of agribusiness on the politics of legislative elections in Brazil. The central argument is that social contexts dominated by agribusiness tend to amplify the number of right-wing micro-parties, due firstly to the economic interests prevalent in such regions and secondly given the ‘catch all’ nature of Brazil's traditional right and centre-right political parties. By showing how agribusiness favours the proliferation of small parties, we may also reveal one of the main reasons behind the ‘hyperfragmentation’ of Brazil's party system.     

Legislative Twitter Style: Electoral Vulnerability,Social Media,and Constituency-Building in Large Multimember Electoral Systems

How do legislators use social media to cultivate their constituencies in large multimember electoral districts? Colombia's Senate nationwide district offers a suitable case to examine how lawmakers, through their behaviour on Twitter, geographically target their audiences. We employ microblog user geolocation methods which infer locations using textual content in order to identify where Colombian senators' Twitter ‘home’ is. We find that senators' location targeting on Twitter largely mirrors the geographical distribution of their votes. Deviations from that pattern mostly stem from their vulnerability to intraparty competition and the nature of their parties' organisation.     

Bye-Bye Bipolarism: The 2015 Regional Elections and the New Shape of Regional Party Systems in Italy

In May 2015, 19 million Italians were called to renew the legislative assemblies and presidencies of seven regions, thus concluding an electoral cycle begun in February 2013 that involved all the 15 ordinary statute regions. Beyond their immediate relevance – of the 15 incumbent presidents only three were confirmed in office – these elections represented a turning point for regional party systems, paralleling the earthquake of the 2013 general elections. The ‘fragmented bipolarism’ characterising elections in Italy at the two levels since the mid-1990s, has been replaced by a multipolar competition, as a consequence of the consolidating presence of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the internal divisions of the centre-right coalition. At the same time, fragmentation of regional councils has remained high. The evolution of regional party systems and patterns of competition are analysed in this paper, taking into account the electoral offer, turnout and results in the majoritarian and proportional arenas of the 15 ordinary statute regions.     

Electoral participation in African democracies: the impact of individual and contextual factors

This paper addresses the question of how electoral participation at the individual level is affected by various political and sociological factors in new democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Relying on Afrobarometer (Round 5) data, the study examines the determinants of voting for over 12,000 voting aged individuals in eight countries. Findings confirm the importance of individual characteristics such as age, associational networks, discussing politics, party identification, religiosity, trust and satisfaction with democracy in predicting turnout at the individual level. But more importantly, the addition of contextual factors significantly improves the individual-level model predicting vote choice in these democracies.     

Anarchy, State, and Dystopia: Venezuelan Economic Institutions before the Advent of Oil

This article studies the evolution of Venezuelan economic institutions before the emergence of oil exploitation in 1920. We argue that, by 1920, Venezuela had developed a highly centralised state and a professionalised military. These two institutions ensured that growing oil revenues would strengthen the state structure and protected Venezuela from the resource-conflict trap into which many oil-abundant countries have fallen. We also argue that the failure to develop institutions that could mediate between sectoral demands and the state, the subordination of property rights to political imperatives and the political dominance of the commercial-financial elite conditioned the nation's response to the post-1920 influx of oil revenues.     

Party systems in Africa: Problems of categorising and explaining party systems

Starting from controversial findings about the relationship between party systems and the prospects of democratic consolidation, this article argues that problems can only be properly addressed on the basis of a differentiated typology of party systems. Contradictory research results do not pose an ‘African puzzle’ but can be explained by different and inadequate approaches. We argue that a modified version of Sartori's typology of party systems provides an appropriate method for classifying African party systems. Based on Sartori's framework, a preponderance of predominant and dominant party systems is identified. This can be explained partly by the prevailing authoritarian nature of many multiparty regimes in Africa but not by electoral systems or the ethnic plurality of African societies. All kinds of electoral systems are connected to dominant party systems. High ethnic fragmentation does not automatically produce highly fragmented party systems. This phenomenon can be attributed to the ‘ethnic congress party’ that is based on an ethnic elite coalition.     

Keeping Up with the Souzas: Social Influence and Electoral Change in a Weak Party System,Brazil 2002–2006

Despite weak partisanship and considerable political change in the wake of the 2002 election, three‐quarters of Brazilian voters supported a presidential candidate in 2006 from the same party they had backed in 2002. This article assesses the factors causing both electoral stability and electoral change with a transition model, a model testing whether the effects of respondents' evaluative criteria depend on their initial vote choices. Social context—personal discussion networks, neighborhood influences, and the interactions of social networks and municipal context—is the major force promoting stability and change, while the impact of partisanship is limited to a small share of voters.     

Ideology, Institutions and Ideas: Explaining Political Change in Venezuela

This article scrutinises the links between patterns and modes of political participation and the emergence of Bolivarianism in Venezuela in the early 1990s. I study how Bolivarianism triumphed over competing projects in a period characterised by widespread unrest and its relationship to the Punto-Fijo institutional structure it overthrew. I argue that the ideas of Bolivarianism are derived from contradictions inherent to the existing institutions, and can only be understood in relation to the values and practices embedded in them, which Bolivarianism aimed to replace.     

对马华公会党员及其政治参与的研究

马华公会是马来西亚政治史上最为重要的华人政党 ,本文对马华公会的党员及其政治参与进行了初步研究。     

Resisting the Fall: The Single Dominant Party,Policies and Elections in Malaysia

Before Malaysia’s 2013 general election, one of the few remaining dominant coalitions in the world was aware it would struggle to retain power. A fledgling opposition coalition had inspired public confidence of its capacity to competently rule while public discontent with the ruling party was rife due to the ubiquity of patronage that had prevented the responsible implementation of policies. However, regime change did not occur. How does the protracted rule of Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional coalition, and the hegemonic party in it, the United Malays National Organisation, relate to debates over authoritarian durability, during a period when dominant parties struggle to sustain power? Malaysian elections have been free enough that the opposition has been able to obtain and retain control of state governments, so why has Barisan Nasional not lost power? This article reviews the 2013 election examining three issues: the significance of coalition politics; how policies have shaped voting trends; and the growing monetisation of politics. These perspectives provide insights into the institutional structure of coalitions and their conduct of politics, including clientelistic practices, forms of mobilisation and governance and the outcomes of policies introduced to address socio-economic inequities and drive economic growth.     

The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations

This article critiques Open Marxism for an ontology which totalises human social practice—for Open Marxists, capitalist social relations are the singular constitutive source of human activity. Such a stance is superficially attractive yet ultimately inadequate, and I reinforce my case by demonstrating how other critical approaches—in this article, Foucauldian perspectives on power—suffer from similar deficiencies. Thus there is a need to resist the temptation of claiming to know how human social practice can be understood with recourse to a singular aspect (no matter how important) of such practice. I conclude that an excellent example of how to avoid such pitfalls is provided by Antonio Gramsci's writings, for they acknowledge the multifaceted yet nevertheless anchored existence lived by humans in capitalist societies.     

Social Capital and Political Support: A Reassessment of the Putnam Thesis in East and West Germany

A sizeable scholarly literature has generally uncovered weak, statistically trivial connections between social capital and political support, in spite of its logical appeal. Much of this research, however, has adopted an overly restrictive research design. It has overwhelmingly focused on the impact of social trust on political trust, from which broad inferences about the utility of the social capital perspective have been made. Rarely, however, has the impact of social capital been systematically assessed on indicators of political support which are more diffuse in character. Using data drawn from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), the present study analyses the impact of different measures of social capital on political support in the Federal Republic of Germany. The results strongly support the conclusion that social capital influences diffuse support.     

The Transformation of Australian Electoral Analysis: The Two‐Party Preferred Vote — Origins,Impacts, and Critics

Measuring party support in Australia by constructing a “two‐party preferred” vote has had a profound effect, not only on the way political scientists, journalists, and politicians understand electoral “swing” and predict electoral outcomes, but also on their understanding of the party system, their thinking about electoral fairness, and their views about which party or parties can legitimately claim government. This article traces the origins — the maternity as well as the paternity – of the “two‐party preferred”. It documents its spread from federal to state elections, even as voting systems in some states have switched from exhaustive preferential to optional preferential. It discusses its wide‐ranging impact, and its implications for notions of electoral fairness and the legitimacy of election outcomes. It evaluates various criticisms of the concept — technical, pragmatic, and conceptual. And it notes the implications for marginal seat campaigning of the commonly observed “uniform swing”— implications completely at odds with the idea that marginal seats matter.     

The five shades of grey: party systems and authoritarian institutions in post-Soviet Central Asian states

ABSTRACT

This article overviews and seeks to explain the processes of party system formation in the post-Soviet Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) by focusing on a crucial party-system property, fragmentation. The analysis reveals that to a much greater extent than in democracies, where party systems are largely shaped by societal factors, the level of party system fragmentation in autocracies is determined by the scope of presidential powers, as entrenched in the formal institutional order and reflected in the national constitution. The level of authoritarianism is largely inconsequential for party system fragmentation, while the role of electoral rules is secondary. Institutionally weak and institutionally strong autocratic presidents have a preference for fragmented party systems, while presidents with an intermediate range of powers seek and obtain low levels of party system fragmentation.     

Methods, Theories and Evidence: A Reply to Arzheimer

Kai Arzheimer's careful and thorough comment upon my earlier BJPIR article raises a number of important issues. While engaging in a thorough critique of the original article's methods, he also points to the (perhaps) inherent problems any quantitative approach may encounter in this area. The consequences of this are that if we wish to assess whether there are social determinants to participation, quantitative methods are limited. In the light of this, after addressing some mis-characterisations in his comment, this reply seeks to provide qualitative evidence that there may well be a link between welfare state institutions and outputs and participation.     

Social media,civil unrest and government responses: the Zimbabwean experience

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the discontent that increased against the Robert Mugabe led government as a result of grave socio-economic and political grievances, and in the context of accessible social media platforms which mobilised and empowered disenfranchised Zimbabweans to challenge the regime after the 2013 elections. Among other factors, the mounting discontent was caused by the belated payment of civil servants’ salaries, inability to create employment opportunities, refusal to enact electoral reforms, rampant corruption and the introduction of import ban restrictions. This led to the formation of civic organisations which demanded the resignation of Mugabe and these included, but were not limited to, #Tajamuka and #ThisFlag. In response, the Mugabe led government used rigid and repressive measures targeting the protesters, as well as traditional and social media platforms to safeguard itself.