The Geography of Economic Inequality, Institutions and Party System Territorialization

Abstract

This paper tackles a familiar question in the study of parties and party systems: why some countries develop party systems dominated by regional or local parties whereas other countries have party systems dominated by parties with broad national constituencies and broad programmatic appeals (Cox 1997, 2003; Chhibber and Kollman 2004; Hicken 2009; Morgenstern 2009). Scholars have mostly focused on institutions to explain variation in the territorial structure of party systems. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the societal structure under which these institutions operate. This paper points to this theoretical gap, and argues that societal preferences and especially the geographic distribution of these preferences are important to understand the incentives of candidates and voters to coordinate across districts. I explore this claim by focusing on the geography of economic preferences. I show that an uneven distribution of income across regions in a country creates incentives for candidates and voters to go regional. Furthermore, I show that the effect of an unequal geography of income can be mitigated by loose/weakly disciplined party organizations. In sum, I show that contrary to the expectations of scholars, institutions seldom have a direct effect on the territorial nature of party systems; instead, how preferences are distributed in space (in interaction with institutions) better explains the strategies of candidates and voters to coordinate across territorial units.