Electoral Organization Research Articles

Candidatos sin militancia, transfuguismo y fragilidad institucional de los partidos políticos en el Perú

Peruvian political parties have become electoral organizations that make use of unaffiliated candidates to gain votes. This situation makes them completely dependent on outsiders to stand out in an election and preserve their inscription. However, this causes the existence of many cases of party desertions of unaffiliated officials whose party loyalty is exceptionally low, thus diminishing the party influence and strength. Free Peru and Pedro Castillo’s relation is the most representative instance of this phenomenon, made clear since the presidential elections of 2021 up until the subsequent party fracture and creation of new parliamentary groups that have set their interests above those of the party that originally brought them to power.

Why Political Parties don’t and do Matter in Local Government Elections in Indonesia: A Manado Case

ABSTRACT Introduction: Despite decentralization devolving increasing decision-making powers to subnational governments across Asia, the subject of local-level elections has not received anywhere near the academic attention afforded to national elections. This article aims to make a contribution to filling this gap in the literature on the dynamics of local election by examining the political parties’ activities in the 2010 local executive election in Indonesia through the detailed case study of Manado City. Materials and Methods: This article used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies for a case study of the Manado local government election in 2010. These methods include direct observation which had been done during the election in 2010, review of relevant media articles and books, collection of statistics from relevant government organizations and interviews. The latter comprised the most important and novel aspect of the research. The interviews were of two types: First, there was a quantitative survey of 100 selected voter respondents using questionnaire with 22 closed-ended questions. Second, there were semi-structured interviews with the local leaders of political parties, the heads of campaign teams, the candidates, the members of the local electoral organization, the representatives of NGOs, mass media personnel and the survey organisations who monitored the election. The quantitative data was explored with the aid of a computer application program (SPSS) while the qualitative data was analysed through a thematic approach. Although the qualitative data collection and analysis was dominant, the quantitative methodology was still important in this article. Results: This article found a paradoxical situation in that political parties did not and did matter. They did not matter case was supported by evidence showing that voters chose candidates based on their personalities, behaviours and programs rather than on party loyalty. On the contrary, they did matter case derived from the superior organisational abilities of parties in running successful election campaigns and in aligning themselves with the candidates most likely to win. Discussion: This article had made a valuable addition to explaining the activities of political parties at local level in the context of decentralization. The implication of this research is that although voters did not choose political parties, the latter were nonetheless highly significant in determining the outcome of the local government election in Manado City. So, it is useful for future research to consider more closely the role of parties in local elections.

The Socialist Macro-Sect in the 'Digital Age': The Victorian Socialists' Strategy for Assembling a Counter-Public

The Victorian Socialists (VicSocialists) are a socialist electoral organisation in Australia which has had some electoral success as a regional fourth party behind the Greens. This article seeks to address what kind of organisation the VicSocialists are, what communicative techniques the organisation employs in assembling a counterpublic or constituency, and what this case study illustrates in terms of the broader formation of counterpublics in the ‘digital age’. This article characterises the VicSocialists as a “macro-sect”, a new organisational form. The macro-sect is something more than a socialist micro-sect and less than a mass party, while optimistically conceiving of itself as a proto-mass party. The macro-sect strategy is distinct from another 21st-century party-form, the digital party. Unlike the digital parties, which tend to fetishise digital media, the VicSocialists treat digital media soberly as just one tool in the formation and mobilisation of counterpublics, a tool with serious limitations. Additionally, digital media is complementary with face-to-face communication (such as doorknocking) in important ways. A study of a parallel US macro-sect, the DSA, similarly found that activists were ambivalent about digital media, yet strongly used it for promotion. This commonality with the DSA suggests the international emergence of a new organisational form, with a distinct communicative strategy for forming counterpublics in the so-called ‘digital age’ – one which necessarily uses digital media, yet does not fetishise it.

Change in political party strategy and organization in Turkey: the Republican People’s Party in government and in opposition

ABSTRACT Political parties rely heavily on clientelistic networks in Turkey. However, parties may change and pursue alternative strategies while appealing to voters. The goal of this study is to explain why political parties change their strategies from clientelistic to programmatic or vice versa. Therefore, the key question is: under what conditions do parties adopt a clientelistic strategy or a programmatic strategy? Based on field research in Istanbul, Turkey, concerning party-voter linkages, I argue that parties’ access to state resources affects the changes in party strategy. When a party is involved in a governing coalition, the party is more likely to pursue a clientelistic strategy; conversely, when a party becomes the opposition, it is more likely to pursue a programmatic strategy. In order to support my arguments, this research observes government (1991–1995) and opposition (2002–2015) periods of the Republican People’s Party (CHP, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi). In this context, the CHP’s electoral strategy and local organizations are observed in the more developed Kadıköy and less developed Esenler districts in Istanbul.

What Is Electoral Psychology?—Scope, Concepts, and Methodological Challenges for Studying Conscious and Subconscious Patterns of Electoral Behavior, Experience, and Ergonomics

Electoral psychology is defined as any model based on human psychology that is used to explain any electoral experience or outcome at the individual or aggregate level. Electoral psychology can also be an interface with other crucial aspects of the vote. For example, the interface between electoral psychology and electoral organization constitutes electoral ergonomics. The very nature of the models tested in electoral psychology has also led scholars in the field to complement mainstream social science methodologies with their own specific methodological approaches in order to capture the subconscious component of the vote and the subtle nature of the psychological processes determining the electoral experience and the way in which it permeates citizens’ thoughts and lives. After defining electoral psychology, this introductory article scopes its analytical roots and contemporary relevance, focuses on the importance of switching from “institution-centric” to “people-centric” conceptions of electoral behavior, and notably how it redefines key concepts such as electoral identity and consistency, and approaches questions of personality, morality, memory, identity, and emotions in electoral psychological models. Then, it discusses some of the unique methodological challenges that the field faces, notably when it comes to analyzing largely subconscious phenomena, and addresses them, before explaining how the various contributions to this Special Issue give a flavor of the scope and approaches of electoral psychology contributions to electoral studies.

Electoral Ergonomics: Three Empirical Examples of the Interface between Electoral Psychology and Design

Electoral ergonomics pertains to the interface between electoral psychology and electoral design. It moves beyond traditional models of electoral organisation that often focus on mechanical effects or changes to who actually votes to investigate the ways in which different forms of electoral organisation will switch on and off various electoral psychology buttons (in terms of personality, memory, emotions and identity) so that the very same person’s electoral experience, thinking process, and ultimately electoral behaviour will change based on the design of electoral processes. This article illustrated this phenomenon based on two case studies, one which showed that young people seemed more likely to vote for radical right parties if they voted postally than in person at the polling station based on panel study evidence from the UK, and another which showed that the time citizens deliberate about their vote varied from 1 to 3 depending on whether they were asked to vote using materialised or dematerialised mono-papers or poly-paper ballots. The article suggested that electoral ergonomics, as the interface between electoral psychology and election design, exceeded the sum of its parts.

Dark-ish Money: What ‘Pop-Up PACs’ Can Teach Us About Donors and Disclosure

Since the Citizens United decision of 2010, the amount of “dark money”–or independent expenditures from groups that don’t disclose their donors–has grown to encompass a significant slice of total spending in American elections. How does the absence of disclosure affect the behavior of both donors and electioneering organizations? While the secretive design of dark money makes data on them extremely limited, the 2018 election provided a useful stand-in to examine the role of disclosure in elections. ‘Pop-Up PACs’ are super PACs that form just after the last disclosure federal deadline before an election–allowing them to postpone revealing their donors until after voters have gone to the polls. In total, 63 super PACs employed this tactic during the 2018 midterms, spending a combined $21.6 million. Examining these late-disclosing super PACs, I find that donors who gave to Pop-Up PACs supported a far less ideologically extreme set of candidate when giving directly and transparently to other candidates. These late-disclosing super PACs also supported more ideologically extreme candidates than did super PACs who disclosed their donors prior to an election. In sum, these results add credence to theories that donors alter their behavior in response to social pressures and that being able to hide the sources of one’s money correlates with an electoral organization eschewing moderates in favor of extremists.

Endogenous ballot structures: The selection of open and closed lists in Colombia’s legislative elections

What are the incentives for parties to personalize electoral competition? This paper proposes that both open and closed lists give congruity, rather than tension, to the interests of party leaders and candidates. However, the efficacy of each list type depends on the electoral returns expected from promoting the partisan and personal vote. To test this argument, we analyze the choices of parties over the ballot structure by leveraging an unusual institutional feature of the Colombian legislative elections, wherein parties are allowed to present either an open or a closed list, varying their choices across electoral districts and contests. Our empirical analysis shows that parties are more likely to open their lists in high-magnitude districts and wherever they have a strong, local electoral organization. We also find a positive relationship between the selection of closed lists among personalist parties, providing evidence to previous arguments proposing a closed list as a tool to concentrate campaign efforts behind a particular candidate.

Desempeño de los mecanismos de vinculación interinstitucional planteados por la reforma de 2014

Este artículo evalúa el actual modelo de gobernanza electoral, producto de la reforma política de 2014 que estableció un nuevo esquema de cooperación entre el Instituto Nacional Electoral y los organismos públicos locales electorales. Lo anterior, a partir del estudio de los canales de coordinación interinstitucional que la propia ley establece. Los hallazgos muestran que la colaboración ha sido posible y que la existencia de estos nuevos canales ha logrado que la cooperación entre institutos electorales trascienda lo señalado en la reforma de 2014. Los instrumentos de cooperación que se han utilizado son designación, remoción, regulación, realización conjunta de actividades, atracción y asunción. Los beneficios demostrados por esos instrumentos hacen necesario reflexionar sobre la posibilidad de estrenar algunos otros canales de colaboración disponibles, tales como la delegación. Éste transformaría el esquema de incentivos, aprovecharía la experiencia local y reduciría costos en la organización de elecciones.

Casilla única en la Ciudad de México en la elección de 2015. Reflejo del sistema electoral nacional

La reforma constitucional en materia político-electoral de 2014 en México significó un cambio paradigmático en el funcionamiento administrativo del sistema electoral y en la relación entre las autoridades electorales, tanto nacional como locales. La implementación de un modelo de casilla única, que permitiera a la ciudadanía votar en un mismo lugar y ante una sola mesa directiva durante la elección concurrente, puso a prueba la coordinación interinstitucional entre autoridades electorales en diferentes niveles, en el contexto de un sistema administrativo híbrido surgido de las disposiciones constitucionales. Este trabajo analiza tres procesos fundamentales de la organización electoral desde la óptica local del Distrito Federal, ahora Ciudad de México, e invita a una reflexión sobre los retos superados y las áreas de oportunidad identificadas, en un sistema electoral que, por una parte, limita la autonomía de las autoridades electorales locales bajo el supuesto de lograr elecciones íntegras, y por otra, cuestiona la vigencia del pacto federal nacional.

1910 Colombian constitutional reform and the electoral system (1910-1914)

In 1910 in Colombia a constitutional reform took place. It was promulgated through Legislative Act 03 and its aim was to strengthen the development of democracy, as a strategy for mediating the bipartisan conflict that Colombian society had been living through since the XIX century. Therefore, governments needed to be legitimated periodically and systematically through the ballot box. Although the elections were not enough to define a democratic political system, they were associated with the expression of representative democracy. The objective of this work is to analyze in what way the constitutional reform was intended to introduce an electoral system that would allow the elites to solve the problems of governability and representation, without significantly expanding the number of voters. The study of the elections is mainly carried as from political history, which allows for the analysis of how the constitutional reform was a strategy of the elites to reorganize the political and economic context after the thousand-day war (1898-1902), and thus avoid the development of a new conflict. Through the constitutional reform, representative democracy, centered on elections as a mechanism for legitimating power, was called for, and a new form of electoral organization was established which had its center in the capital of the country and from there links were made to the processes carried out in the departments and municipalities.

Democratic Dynasties: Explaining Their Prevalence in Modern Democracies

Though no systematic cross-national data exist political dynasties seem common in some countries yet almost completely absent in others. Dynasties might be important because if dynastic politics is common it may prevent meritocratic access to position of political power, thus denying the political system talent. But what explains the existence and variation in the extent of political dynasties? The popular literature seems to point to culture, but we develop a theory based on the electoral system and party organisation. In short we expect dynasties to be more common where the electoral system is candidate based and where party organisations are personalised rather than institutionalised. Using a number of cases, Argentina, the US, the UK, Ireland, Japan, The Netherlands and Israel we find support for our hypothesis.

Party Nationalization and the Politics of Geographic Redistribution in Spain

This paper argues that the nationalization of electoral alignments and party organization has repercussions for the extent to which 'regional favouritism' is a dominant feature of distributive policy in a particular country. In particular, coalitional politics in the presence of parties with narrow geographic bases of support, such as regional parties or parties with regionalized patterns of support, may encourage 'over-investment' by central governments in distributive log-rolling and regional pork-barrel spending. Empirically, the paper explores patterns in the regional allocation of infrastructure investment to Provinces by central government in Spain from 1978-2010, and tests two central hypotheses. Firstly, it investigates the extent to which regional parties in Spain have historically been able to secure disproportional investment for core support constituencies, when these parties are pivotal for government formation. Secondly, we explore a more novel hypothesis relating the relative nationalization of the major governing parties of the democratic era, to their propensity to engage in political distribution towards favoured electoral constituencies. The paper finds that parties vary significantly in their use of tactical 'pork-barrel' spending, depending on the degree to which their electoral support is 'nationalized' across all regions within the country.

The Electoral Management of the Yorkshire Election of 1784

'The Electoral Management of the Yorkshire Election of 1784'. In the general election of 1784 the Fitzwilliam Whig candidates for Yorkshire declined the poll the night preceding the county election and conceded victory to the pro-Pitt nominees who received organisational support from the Yorkshire Association. This paper uses the Yorkshire county election to provide a detailed case study of electoral organisation and management. It outlines the national and regional political contexts of the election and examines the political and religious prejudices of the protagonists. Furthermore, it details the costs involved and explores the logistics of bringing the enfranchised freeholders, in England's largest constituency, to poll. This paper compares the organisations set up by both sides to direct the election, demonstrating the increasingly professional approach taken by election committees towards the end of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates how in this election the experienced and near-professional committee established by the Yorkshire Association overwhelmed the amateur committee of aristocrats convened by the Earl Fitzwilliam, prompting the latter to make significant changes to his electoral organisation and electioneering strategy for future elections.

Kan Naoto: Symbol of a New Politics in Japan?

This article offers historical insights into the political philosophy, electoral strategies and commitment to ‘change’ politics of Kan Naoto, who in June 2010 became leader of the Democratic Party of Japan and the nation's new prime minister. The preface introduces an unpublished paper that the author wrote immediately after Kan's first electoral success in 1980, not long after the author's extensive personal interviews with the then budding political aspirant. That paper, which follows, reveals how Kan's entry into the national political system he now leads is quite atypical of Japanese politicians generally and certainly of most of his predecessor prime ministers who were supported by a powerful mix of wealth and connections, often through inheritance. Instead Kan is a ‘self-made’ politician, the first to reach national leadership initially through participatory democracy: electoral organizations based on citizen movements and grassroots involvement in national politics. The epilogue that follows considers the possible consequences of this style of political advancement for how Kan operates as leader of his party, the national political system, and the Japanese nation.

The Political Mobilization of Catholic Women in Spain’s Second Republic: The CEDA, 1931—6

During Spain’s Second Republic (1931—6) women gained the right to vote and joined the front lines of political debate. Catholics in particular sought to mobilize women, and the main Catholic political entity, the CEDA, was the most successful in doing so. While the CEDA’s female members never gained an equal voice with men, they had more political influence than any previous Spanish women. This article studies the role that women played in the CEDA and argues that women were integral to the electoral success of the CEDA through their participation in electoral organization, propaganda efforts, and the CEDA’s social aid program.

La primera cédula de ciudadanía en Colombia (1929-1952) o el fracaso de una institución

This article shows how, after a series of frustrated attempts, the union between the minority Liberal Party and a fraction of the Conservative Party led to the approval by the Colombian Congress in 1929 of a law that created the certificate of citizenship as a public document required for the act of voting. Fiscal difficulties prevented carring effect of the law, which could only be done contemporaneously in the beginning of the so-called Second Liberal Republic (1934-1946), in which the party of that name, at that time in power, mled without having its traditional adversary, which allowed the Conservative spokesmen promoted the idea that the identification processes undertaken by the Govemment excluded liberal supporters. The truth is that the identification processes advanced with multiple disabilities, who could not be corrected before. Only the issuance in 1948 of a new law, after the farnous Bogotazo, created the modern Electoral Organization that, with taking elements of Chilean law, purged the Electoral Organization as a whole, putting it beyond the control of the parties and assigning the function of issuing the certificate of citizenship, which has done so today.

Conservative Party Mutual Aid: Myth or Reality?

Mutual Aid, the practice by which Conservative constituency associations in safe seats regularly sent groups of party workers to nearby marginals, was widely presumed at the time to have been a contributory factor to consecutive Conservative General Election victories in the 1950s. Indeed, Mutual Aid is still a part of party electoral organisation today. However the practice has been subject to little detailed analysis, its effectiveness and contribution to Conservative electoral recovery simply taken for granted. It is the purpose of this article to examine the origin, operation and effectiveness of Mutual Aid in the marginal constituencies. Although the direct impact of Mutual Aid may always be impossible to prove beyond doubt in terms of victories won, it can be shown that the perception of its wider benefits guaranteed it a place in the party hierarchy's campaigning strategy.

Managers and Agents: Conservative Party Organisation in the 1850s*

During the 1850s in the wake of the calamitous Peelite split, Britain's Conservative Party struggled to rebuild its numbers in the house of commons. The structure of the party's electoral organisation is well known‐parliamentary leaders, election managers such as Sir William Jolliffe and Philip Rose, plus local constituency based agents. Jolliffe's and Rose's 1859 election notebooks help understand this, but they also reveal serious gaps in the Conservatives' information networks. This article delineates the electoral activities of Sir John Yarde Buller (first Baron Churston) and his ally Samuel Triscott, who supplemented the spasmodic flow of information from small boroughs in at least two counties. Mid‐level or second‐tier managers, to whom no attention has previously been given, assisted the Conservatives in their gradual electoral recovery. Their roles also suggest that the party's organization may have been more complex than previously believed.

The Rise and Fall of Christian Democracy in Europe

The role of Christian Democratic parties after World War II in helping to build stable parliamentary regimes in Western Europe deserves attention simply for their ability to survive. Such parties took root in Catholic countries and electorates and incorporated electoral organizations from the early twentieth century. After the war, Christian Democrats provided an alternative to the large Communist parties that were particularly strong in France and Italy. They also represented a link to the European past that was not implicated in the crimes of the Nazi era. Germany's Christian Democracy has proven the most successful of its kind. It moved beyond its original Catholic base to include a significant Protestant minority. And it has survived amidst the social and cultural changes and charges of corruption that have reduced their counterparts elsewhere to a secondary parliamentary force.