Party Politics

Political scientists have not paid sufficient attention to the driving forces of ruling party stability, although other areas of political stability, such as democratic stability, leadership stability and cabinet stability have been studied extensively. This research fills a significant gap. It focuses on electoral rules and political party systems to explain ruling party durability. It demonstrates the following: (1) ruling parties’ hazard rates under the first-past-the-post systems are initially lower than those under proportional representation rules, but this tendency reverses over time, and (2) ruling parties’ hazard rates under two-party systems are initially lower than those under multiparty systems, but this too reverses.

Relying on data from a natural experiment in Spain, I produce an unbiased estimate of the extent to which strategic voting occurs in multi-member districts. I show that voters have fully adapted to the different incentives provided by distinctive electoral systems in Spain since the first election and also that they behave strategically only when the opportunity to do so is present. That is, contamination effects do not seem to exist when voting strategically.

This article provides a dynamic framework through which factionalism can be examined and the circumstances of individual parties compared in multi-level contexts. We discuss the interaction between factionalism and party structure by setting out a model of factional organization dependent on the tolerance of host parties to dissent and their degree of vertical integration, their combination yielding four possible strategies for opposition factions: centralized, inter-layered, multi-layered and decentralized. We also consider what implications there are for the party’s dominant coalition in episodes of high factionalism. These act as a catalyst for the modification of party rules that regulate dissent and vertical distribution of power. The hypotheses developed are tested on four Spanish political parties that differ on the autonomy of regional branches and factions, the competitive position in the party system and factionalism type – more policy or more patronage-oriented.

Many legislative recruitment scholars seek to explain why women, visible minorities and other social groups are underrepresented in the world’s legislatures. Researchers in this area often use a supply and demand metaphor to frame their work, but cannot agree whether underrepresentation is mainly a supply- or demand-side problem. With an eye to moving this debate forward, this article offers a new approach to operationalizing supply and demand and shows how reverse-flow diagnostic testing, supply-first analysis and an improved testing regime can pinpoint when and why underrepresentation begins to occur in any political system. The new diagnostic approach is applied to data from a provincial election in British Columbia, Canada. The article uses the new diagnostic and BC case to demonstrate how underrepresentation in any political system is attributable to demand-side discrimination by gatekeepers and not an undersupply of political aspirants from any particular social group.

Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.

Did the ideological discourse of the KPRF, the communist successor party in post-Communist Russia, evolve in the same direction as the identity and discourse of the majority of ex-communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe which now embrace social democracy? In particular, did the KPRF’s Marxist–Leninist and nationalist–socialist rhetoric change with time as the political climate for its functioning as the only viable Russian opposition party continued to deteriorate? This question is addressed through content analysis of public documents and internal party documents, which reveals that the latter are considerably more liberal and democratic in tone than the former.

The struggle for the power to nominate candidates for office between party elites and rank-and-file partisans surfaced in the late 1700s. The battle endures today and superdelegates in the Democratic Party represent the contemporary political elites in the nomination process. Indeed, superdelegates played a decisive role in determining the outcome of the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign. In this paper, we examine the attitudes and decisions of superdelegates towards the candidates and their own role in the nomination process. We also examine the attitudes of rank-and-file Democrats towards the delegates and the nomination process. To study these two groups, we rely on survey data collected immediately following the 2008 primary season. Results from the surveys indicate that voters and superdelegates differ greatly in their perceptions of superdelegates, their roles and decisions, as well as the legitimacy of the nomination process in the Democratic Party. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings.

This article tests the hypothesis that differences in the housing market can partially explain why some American counties are strongly Republican and others strongly Democratic, and that this phenomenon can be largely attributed to the relationship between home values and marriage rates within counties. Specifically, I test the hypothesis that, in the 2000 election, George W. Bush did comparatively better in counties with relatively affordable single-family homes, even when controlling for other economic, demographic and regional variables. Using county-level data, I test this hypothesis using spatial-lag regression models, and provide further evidence using individual-level survey data. My results indicate a statistically significant relationship between Bush’s percentage of the vote at the county level and the median value of owner-occupied homes, and that at least part of this is explained by the relationship between home values and marriage rates among young women.