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.     

关注艾滋病对老年妇女的影响

老年妇女同样面临感染艾滋病风险,她们的感染人数在悄然增长。子女感染艾滋病病毒后,对老年妇女的经济、健康、心理和晚年保障各方面产生严重后果。在广大发展中国家,她们还担负着照料和支持艾滋病子女的重要角色。在以往艾滋病的研究和行动中,公众、研究者和决策者都忽略了艾滋病对处于年龄和性别双重弱势地位的老年妇女的影响,妇女在艾滋病相关工作中很少得到关注和重视。因此,有必要了解艾滋病对老年妇女的影响并研究应采取的对策。     

Electoral institutions, partisan status, and political support in Lesotho

Does the introduction of proportionality in electoral systems help to boost popular evaluations of democracy? This article takes advantage of an electoral reform in Lesotho to conduct a natural experiment. We trace shifts over time in popular political support, using Afrobarometer data collected before and after reform to measure mass satisfaction with democracy and public trust in political institutions. We find both direct and indirect effects. In the aggregate, Lesotho's transition from a majoritarian to a mixed electoral system is directly associated with increased levels of citizen support for the country's state and regime. Importantly, however, formal institutions have only indirect effects at the individual level, where a person's informal partisan status – as a member of a winning majority or losing minority – mediates the impacts of institutional change.     

美国次贷危机的原因及影响

美国次贷危机的爆发,直接原因是美国住房市场降温、货币政策调整、金融衍生产品过度创新、信用过度膨胀、金融监管放松等因素造成的结果：次贷危机对美国及全球金融和实体经济都产生了重大影响,经济出现衰退。分析美国次贷危机产生的原因及影响,对我们了解和认识发达市场经济国家的宏观经济现状、矛盾及发展变化规律很有必要。     

Can citizens care too much? Investment in election outcomes and perceptions of electoral legitimacy

Might there be a downside to citizen engagement with elections? The tendency for citizens who supported a winning candidate or party to be more supportive of the democratic system and more trusting of government than supporters of the losers has been well documented. I test the extent to which individual-level investment in a presidential election campaign amplifies effects of winning or losing using the online component of the 2008 NAES to track the same individuals' from pre-election to post-election. The analysis provides strong evidence of amplifying effects of investment on the relationship between winning or losing and perceptions of electoral legitimacy. Certain types of investment—policy agreement and participation—appear to hold significant implications only for losers and not winners.     

Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

Party system dynamics and the making and breaking of Italian governments

This paper explores the dynamics of the highly fluid Italian legislative party system. It uses the same theoretical approach as the paper by Laver and Kato (this issue) to explore the making and breaking of governments in Italy following electoral reform. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, the electoral system provides incentives for parties to band together into cartels in order to fight elections, with the winning cartel forming a government coalition. Inter-electoral legislative party competition, however, within a structure of permissive rules on the formation of legislative party groups, provides incentives for at least some members of the winning cartel to defect. The facility with which legislative parties can split and combine in Italy creates a highly dynamic decisive structure underpinning the making and breaking of governments. This cannot usefully be analysed with traditional models that take parties as unitary actors and assume that the party system is essentially fixed for the entire inter-electoral period.     

The personal vote and voter turnout

The level of electoral turnout is arguably the most widely monitored form of electoral participation. Consequently, electoral systems have often been cited as having a significant effect on turnout levels even though scholars do not agree on the effects of these complex institutions. Since most previous studies have relied on categorical or dichotomous electoral system indicators, this study utilizes Carey and Shugart’s personal vote index to gain theoretical leverage on other electoral system components. In short, I find that where electoral competition is predicated on party, rather than candidates’, reputations, turnout levels rise. The results of a time-series cross-sectional analysis reveal that the personal vote index significantly influences turnout levels even when controlling for a host of other factors.     

Strategic coalition voting: Evidence from Austria

Strategic coalition voting assumes that voters cast their vote in a way that maximizes the probability that a preferred coalition will be formed after the election. We identify three decision contexts that provide incentives for strategic coalition voting: (1) a rental vote of a major party supporter in favor of a preferred junior coalition partner perceived as uncertain to pass a minimum vote threshold, (2) avoiding a wasted vote for the preferred small party that is not expected to pass the minimum vote threshold, and (3) explicit strategic coalition voting to influence the composition and/or portfolio of the next coalition government. The results based on a nationally representative survey conducted before the 2006 Austrian general election generally support these hypotheses.     

韩国政治中的选举活动与党内竞选

韩国于1948年5月10日举行选举,产生了制宪国会,制定了大韩民国宪法并成立了政府,这在韩国历史上具有特殊意义。但与西方建立的普通、平等、直接保密选举的民主式选举制度不同,由于韩国民众缺乏对选举制度的深刻认识,而且权利意识淡薄,因此历届选举均由于执政者的不正当介入,民意被极大歪曲。本文通过对现行选举制度的深层剖析来探讨韩国选举制度存在的问题以及今后面临的课题。