Electoral institutions, social cleavages, and candidate competition in presidential elections

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the determinants of party fragmentation in legislative elections advocates an interactive model that incorporates the combined influence of political institutions and social cleavages. I assess the relative contribution of this new approach for understanding candidate competition in presidential elections. To do so I employ aggregate and public opinion data from two separate sample populations (50 and 39 presidential democracies respectively) to evaluate two models of candidate/partisan electoral competition: pure institutional and interactive (i.e., where the effect of electoral rules is conditioned by social cleavages). In terms of its explanatory power, a pure institutional model of candidate competition is at times superior to an interactive model, and always at least its equal. This is the case with social cleavages measured using both aggregate ethnic/racial data and public opinion data.