Party Politics

One of the most important developments in southern politics in recent years has been the increase in the number of whites holding Republican Party identifications. This article examines the effects of racial attitudes on changing levels of partisanship. Specifically, the article focuses on the concept of racial resentment or symbolic racism. This is an appropriate concept to examine the effects of the contemporary racial attitudes on partisanship, as racial issues have become much more diffuse in nature. It is argued that in the 1990s the southern Republican congressional leadership was especially successful in making salient issues likely to activate the racial resentment of southern whites. A multivariate analysis demonstrates that racial resentment was not a strong or significant predictor of partisanship prior to 1994; however, in 1994 and 2000 racial resentment had a large and significant effect on partisanship. These findings suggest that race and racial attitudes continue to shape southern party politics in the early twenty-first century.

To what extent are the priorities of voters reflected by the policy pledges of parties? And how decisive are party pledges for the policy-making of governments? The chain of delegation assumes direct linkages between voters, parties and governments, of which the voters are the principal actor. When this assumption is tested for The Netherlands, it turns out that parties are not very responsive to voter priorities and that the policy distances between parliamentary parties and governments are relatively small. This pattern makes sense in a consensus democracy in which parties have to compromise and cannot afford simply to reflect what voters perceive as important. It also suggests that the mandate theory is more directly applicable to majoritarian democracies, where the winner takes all and therefore has more scope to translate voter priorities into policy-making.

This research examines the form and content of state party websites in the 2000 US election, and considers whether or not state parties are following the lead of the national parties. Generally, state parties attempted to provide essential party functions online, but lacked technical sophistication in 2000. The range of state party websites was broad - from state parties that lacked simple graphics to those with streaming video. Highly integrated parties (those receiving large soft-money transfers) produced the strongest websites and demonstrated the most expertise in this emerging medium.

Conventional belief suggests that the ruling party in the ‘single non-transferable voting’ (SNTV) system can often coordinate legislative candidates through the allocation of resources, and previous research shows that both local factions and budget distribution influence the process of candidate coordination. Modeling the seat shares of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the 1992, 1995, 1998 and 2001 legislative elections, this article contends that the number of local factions and chairmen in parliament largely determines the KMT’s seat gains. Evidence shows that the KMT was apt to coordinate candidates through the position of committee chairpersons in the Legislative Yuan, and its failure to do so in the 2001 election contributed to its fall.

Present research on minor party performance consists largely of single-country studies or pooled studies including a raft of widely varying electoral systems. This study examines the topic from a cross-national perspective, but is limited to democratic polities with single-member districts and first-past-the-post rules. An original dataset is compiled including 217 elections drawn from 37 countries and several historical eras. Five political-institutional factors are explored: (1) federalism, (2) presidentialism, (3) electoral system institutionalization, (4) party organization, and (5) electoral volatility. The evidence suggests that major party hegemony is more complete in polities with unitary constitutions, parliamentary executives, long-enduring electoral systems, strong party organization and low electoral volatility.

The article compares proximity and Rabinowitz/Macdonald directional models of issue voting according to their ability to predict preferences for the six Hungarian parliamentary parties. It was assumed that in a relatively new democracy directional models should perform better, since voters would have more difficulty recognizing the exact positions of parties on different issue dimensions. Furthermore, it was assumed that political sophistication would influence the observed relationships. The analysis is based on a Hungarian national random sample, and an additional survey of members of the Hungarian parliament. The data include voters’ and representatives’ expressed preferences concerning eight specific policy issues, as well as their positions on the left-right dimension. Although voters’ issue preferences appear as relatively weak predictors of vote choice, the directional model generally outperformed the proximity model, the difference being greater in the less politically sophisticated group. In addition, the vote is better explained by positions on the left-right scale than on specific issues.