Contemporary Party Research Articles

Explaining Elections in Singapore: Party Credibility & Valence Politics

The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of theories of democratization? We argue that valence considerations---specifically, perceptions of party credibility---are the dominant factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate and a critical piece to the puzzle of the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to demonstrate evidence in support of our argument through a within-case, historical analysis; a qualitative analysis of contemporary party competition and voter behavior; and a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the 2011 and 2015 general elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits to the advantages it confers.

A House Divided? Roll Calls, Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

AbstractThe study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.

Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.

Contemporary Australian Political Party Organisations

Contemporary Australian Political Party Organisations. Edited by Narelle Miragliotta, Anika Gauja and Rodney Smith (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2015), pp xx+263. AU$49.95 (pb).

“I’m Paying, So I Decide”

Business-firm parties founded on the initiative of a political entrepreneur are a phenomenon of growing importance in contemporary party politics. In practice, these are either commercial companies, whose structure is used for a political project, or new and separate organisations constructed on business principles. This article examines the case of Czech party ANO (“YES”), established by the owner of the Agrofert holding company Andrej Babiš. The party achieved remarkable success in the 2013 Czech general election. The opportunity for ANO’s success was provided by strong voter dissatisfaction, reinforced by the scandalous circumstances of the centre-right government’s fall. This context created a fertile ground for the introduction of a new entity espousing anti-party, anti-corruption, and anti-political sentiments. In ANO’s organisation and functioning, a strengthening of certain traits characteristic of this type of parties is apparent. A robust system for screening party members and representatives has been gradually put into place, and human resources–style techniques of psychological testing were employed at the party’s inception. Furthermore, the power in the party has been wholly centralised around the leader, and the party’s territorial structures assigned merely service tasks. ANO has also maximised its electoral-professional orientation. The strengthening of the typical traits of a business-firm party can be explained by reference to the party’s origin in the business environment and the notions entertained by its leader. In many respects, Babiš’s party has brought the organisational model of a business-firm party to its limits.

Cartelization versus representation? On a misconception in contemporary party theory

According to a popular but controversial view in contemporary party research, political parties increasingly put a premium on governing within the institutions of the state rather than on representation of interests and identities in society. This critique has been phrased most uncompromisingly in Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s theory of the cartel party, according to which the cartel party governs but does not represent, and thus fails to do what we expect of parties in a modern democracy. This article is an analysis and critique of this presupposition, which has largely escaped the attention of commentators. The idea that the cartel party governs but does not represent rests on an untenable view of political representation. As I argue, the normative problem with the cartel party is not so much that this type of party does not represent, as to decide when and how it does or does not represent.

The lives of the party

Intraparty politics is a precursor to political parties’ policy proposals, manifestos, selected leaders and candidates, which often involves many actors and is regularly accompanied by tensions. This essay introduces the contents of a special issue devoted to the internal dynamics of political parties in Europe. We connect each contribution of the issue to three key aspects of intraparty research: (1) sources of information on internal party politics and methods of analysis, (2) how contemporary parties reconcile or otherwise address disagreements within the party and (3) the electoral and other ramifications of internal party tensions or divisions. Overall, the comparative case studies and cross-national comparisons across Western and Eastern Europe included in this issue show that considerations of intraparty dynamics advance scholarly research on alliances and coalitions, party organizations and party competition.

The State of the parties: the changing role of contemporary American parties

The State of the parties: the changing role of contemporary American parties

The Virtues of Participation Without Power: Campaigns, Party Networks, and the Ends of Politics

Following Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund-raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power.

The legacy of Nazism: Historical analogies and support for the far right

This paper examined whether perceiving a historical analogy between former Nazi collaborator parties and contemporary far-right parties is negatively associated with support for the current far right. It was predicted that this relationship would be mediated by perceived immorality of far-right anti-Muslim standpoints. A survey study (Study 1) demonstrated that perceiving this historical analogy is negatively related to both electoral support for the far right and opposition to Muslim expressive rights. An experiment (Study 2) showed that drawing this historical analogy reduces both electoral support for the far right and opposition to Muslim expressive rights through perceived immorality of far-right anti-Muslim standpoints. The implications of historical analogies for people's attitudes toward present-day social and political issues are discussed.

А Comparative Analysis of the Latin American and Russian Nationalist Media Discourse

The author reviews how contemporary parties in Latin America and Russia use the print media for realizing their political strategies. During the research, conducted by applying the methods of the discourse analysis, were revealed some language tools which express the traditional nationalist discourse opposition - us vs. them. Besides were identified techniques of political communication being embraced by politicians in the creating of the image of the enemy and in the reinforcement of fear and misunderstanding. For example, the ones that make the United States a common enemy of Latin America and Russia, or that explain the need to formulate a clear-cut differences between Russia and the Western European countries. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n9p149

Greening the mainstream: party politics and the environment

If the environment becomes the subject of party competition so that mainstream parties compete to be the ‘greenest’ party and move closer to Green party positions that may produce more environmental policy measures and better environmental outcomes. A comparative analysis of the impact of the environmental dimension on contemporary party politics employs the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Manifesto Project empirical data to analyse party positions and issue salience. Green parties still form a homogenous party family characterised by strong environmental, libertarian and left-wing policy positions. Mainstream parties have mostly employed dismissive and accommodative strategies towards the environment, with left-wing parties adopting more pro-environment policy positions than right-wing parties, but with only marginal differences in issue salience that fluctuate over time.

Dispositional Sources of Economic Protectionism

Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens’ chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by recent work in the political realm, influence their preferences for protectionism. Examining data from three different national surveys in the U.S. context, I find strong support for the role of these dispositions. In addition to extending our understanding of the antecedents of trade preferences, the present paper has implications for the study of personality and politics, suggesting heterogeneity in the relationship of dispositions to ideology across issue domains. I also discuss the broader implications for American politics, arguing that these findings suggest latent tensions within contemporary party coalitions.

Problems and perspectives of contemporary European radical left parties: Chasing a lost world or still a world to win?

This paper provides an overview of the key European radical left parties, their ideological stances, their supporters and electoral performance, their links with social movements, policy impact, and reaction to the post-2008 economic crisis. The radical left is increasingly a stabilized, consolidated and permanent actor on the European political scene and has become a principal challenger to mainstream social democratic parties, although it has not fully overcome its own communist-era crisis and its failure so far demonstrably to exploit propitious economic conditions indicates severe weaknesses (particularly the absence of sufficiently electorally attractive strategic vision, the persistence of historical stigma in Eastern Europe, and still-persistent ideological and strategic conflicts). Should such problems be addressed, the contemporary socio-economic and political environment in Europe is only likely to increase the future appeal of the radical left, although radical left parties face significant challenges from Greens, radical right parties and the new European protest movements over which they, as yet, have little influence.

The value and applicability of bargaining in an intergenerational setting

This paper considers the effectiveness of a variation of Coasian bargaining as a policy instrument for internalizing one or multiple intergenerational externalities. The variation involves appointing a contemporary party to represent the interests of the affected parties who are currently unable to represent themselves. Potential criticisms of such a policy are considered and addressed, and precedents to such a policy are put forth. To test the value of such a policy, a two-period model in which two externalities exist in the production/consumption decisions and with representative agents is used to compare the welfare effects of four scenarios: 1) Agents in each period optimize their period-specific utility, 2) a benevolent social planner chooses allocations in both periods to maximize a social welfare function, 3) the externalities are internalized using a bargaining policy, and 4) the externalities are internalized using a tax and subsidy policy. I find that, contrary to general consensus in the literature, Coasian bargaining can be adapted in such a way as to make it applicable in an intergenerational framework.

Fatherhood, UK political culture and the new politics

This article discusses the trope of fatherhood and its deployment within the UK political scene to ask how and why this has become a strategy in the post-ideological context of contemporary party politics. It uses psychoanalytic ideas to explore the fantasies of what is at stake in such a move and explores how politicians can be read as symptomatic of broader struggles around hegemonic masculinity as represented within the celebritized arena of political culture.

What’s in a name? Using surnames as data for party research

We present a novel method which can be used to show that contemporary party systems may originate much further back than is usually assumed or might be expected – in reality many centuries. Using data on Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, jurisdictions with party systems that differ significantly, one of which poses significant challenges to the universality of many political science theories, we show how using surnames as markers can confirm the obvious explanation for the Northern Ireland party system and then propose a novel explanation for the Irish party system. We suggest that surnames could be an objective way of studying migration patterns and ethnic heritage which may be important in explaining party systems.

Politics with Hidden Bases: Unearthing the Deep Roots of Party Systems

The research presented here uses a novel method to show that contemporary party systems may originate much further back than is usually assumed or might be expected—in reality many centuries. Using data on Ireland, a country with a political system that poses significant challenges to the universality of many political science theories, by identifying the ancestry of current party elites we find ethnic bases for the Irish party system arising from population movements that took place from the 12th century. Extensive Irish genealogical knowledge allows us to use surnames as a proxy for ethnic origin. Recent genetic analyses of Irish surnames corroborate Irish genealogical information. The results are particularly compelling given that Ireland is an extremely homogeneous society and therefore provides a tough case for our approach.

Parliamentary salaries as a party resource

Research on contemporary party organization emphasizes the growing power of the party in public office (PPO). The relationship between the external party organization and the PPO, however, is rarely analysed directly. We argue that the capacity of the extra-parliamentary party to regularly extract a fixed share from their MPs' salaries – the collection of ‘party taxes' or ‘tithes' – can give us insights into the level and the nature of control the external organization exercises over MPs within and across organizational levels. Beyond providing new insights into an under-researched, but generally widespread, source of party funding across 25 parties in five Westminster democracies, the study shows the following: while party family shapes a party’s basic capacity to establish an intra-organizational rule that obliges MPs to regularly contribute parts of their salary, ideology drives the salary share a party can expect MPs to pay. The federal–unitary divide affects whether the national or the regional organizations are the main recipients of these contributions.

Competition, contest, and cooperation: The analytic framework of the issue market

Although party competition is widely regarded as an important part of a working democracy, it is rarely analysed in political science literature. This article discusses the basic properties of party competition, especially the patterns of interaction in contemporary party systems. Competition as a phenomenon at the macro level has to be carefully distinguished from contest and cooperation as the forms of interaction at the micro level. The article gives special attention to the creation of issue innovations. Contrary to existing approaches, I argue that not only responsiveness but also innovation are necessary to guarantee a workable democratic competition. Competition takes place on an issue market, where parties can discover voters’ demands. Combined with the concept of institutional veto points, the article presents hypotheses on how institutions shape the possibility for programmatic innovations.