Multiparty Competition Research Articles

From no- party to multi-party competition: Analysing womens candidature in Ugandas 2006 national elections

This article examines the question of women’s candidature in Uganda’s multi-party elections in 2006. For 20 years since 1986, Uganda was governed under a no-party system known as Movement. Under this system electoral competition took place within a framework of individual merit where nomination was based on one’s individual decision to stand for public office. Within this same period there was remarkable increase in women’s political participation at levels with faster progress being made at the local government level than the national and executive. In the following article, derived from a study conducted in 10 districts just before the February 2006 general election held under a multi-party dispensation, we demonstrate that while multi-party politics has thrown up enormous opportunities for possible expansion of the women’s political participation, it has also generated more challenges and complicated existing ones. At the same time the parties remain largely patriarchal men’s clubs. The bridge for women’s political participation is still shaky. The article, however acknowledges that although the bridge is shaky, it is important that it exists at all. Key words: Women's candidature, elections, transition, political parties.

When The Gloves Come Off: Inter-Party Variation in Negative Campaigning

This study examines inter-party variation in negative campaigning within multiparty competition. It advances existing research in two ways. First, it contributes to the theoretical understanding of the determinants of negative campaigning in a multiparty context by differentiating between parties’ vote-seeking and office-seeking incentives and stating the implications of office-seeking for the use of negative campaigning. Second, it empirically tests these new hypotheses by employing content analysis-data from ten Dutch electoral campaigns between 1981 and 2010. The analysis highlights that negative campaigning within a multiparty system is a riskier strategy compared to a two-party context as parties face both electoral backlash effects as well as post-election coalition bargaining costs.

Pathways to Partisanship: Evidence from Russia

Newly competitive party systems provide an opportunity to observe individuals as they first acquire partisan orientations. The development of partisanship shortly after the advent of multiparty competition in Russia is investigated. Expectations from existing scholarship are grouped into potential "pathways" to partisanship: political motivation and ability, voting experience, exposure to politics, civic motivations, group pressures, and immersion in social networks. The contributions of these pathways to partisan stability, consistency, and self-identification are assessed. This study examines the origins of party identification in democracies and helps to clarify a discrepancy between theories of partisanship as a crutch for the unaware and evidence that partisans are more sophisticated than their fellow citizens.

Multi-party competition: A computational model with abstention and memory

This paper analyses the properties of a computational model of multi-party competition in two policy dimensions. We find that, firstly, centrifugal incentives prevent rational parties from moving to the mean of voters' preference distributions. Secondly, the number of parties competing for votes and the inclination to abstain from voting are positively related to parties' optimum distance to the political centre. Thirdly, the number of parties in the political arena also increases both the distance between parties' location in the policy space and the volatility of their platforms. Finally, the more voters rely on past observations of partisan positioning behaviour in order to assess the credibility of parties, the more the distance between partisan platforms increases. At the same time, platform volatility declines.

Democracy by Consensus: Some Conceptual Considerations*

Democracy as a political system entailing multi-party competition for power is only one form of democracy. Given that democracy is government by consent, the question is whether a less adversarial system than the party system, which is bound up with majoritarian decision-making, cannot be devised. This paper contends that a system based on consensus as a decision procedure would be a democracy of just such a description. It is important to note that the kind of consensus envisaged here is not agreement regarding questions of truth and morality; it is concerned only with the question of what is to be done. And it is an important fact that reasonable human beings can come to an agreement about what is to be done by virtue of compromise without agreeing on issues of truth or morality. A consensual system will naturally be a non-party arrangement. However, as I explain, such a polity need not be one without parties.

Governmental Politics and the Dynamics of Multiparty Competition

The politics of coalition government is a phase in a never-ending dynamic process of multiparty political competition. Most models of coalition government are static and focus on the making or the breaking of governments, ignoring or at least holding constant all other aspects of party competition. Here, the author considers some issues that are raised by locating the politics of coalition government in a more dynamic setting.

Public Opinion as a Constraint against War: Democracies' Responses to Operation Iraqi Freedom

A central logic of the democratic peace theory claims that public opinion acts as a powerful restraint against war. Democratic officials, unlike their autocratic counterparts, are wary of going to war because they expect to pay an electoral penalty for fighting even successful wars. Several democracies, however, recently joined Operation Iraqi Freedom despite substantial and even overwhelming domestic opposition. We argue that electoral institutions can heighten or lessen the impact of public opinion on democratic officials' concerns for their reelection prospects, thus pointing to an important dimension of variation that has been overlooked in the democratic peace literature. However, contrary to conventional attributions of a greater incentive motivating the parties and candidates in predominantly two-party systems with majority/plurality decision rules to respond to national public opinion, we suggest mitigating factors that tend to reduce such responsiveness. Conversely, we point out that multiparty competition in proportional representation systems can reduce electoral disproportionality without sacrificing responsiveness to public opinion. The pertinent electoral institutions therefore present varying opportunities (or, conversely, constraints) for democratic officials to override their constituents' sentiments when they are so inclined.

A General Equilibrium Model of Multi-Party Competition

The paper introduces a generalized spatial model that is motivated by the frequent changes in party identity and electoral laws that characterize transitional party systems. In this model, parties may (1) change their platforms, (2) their identities through coalitions and splits and (3) if they form a winning coalition, the electoral law. The equilibrium is defined as a state such that no party or coalition can strictly benefit from changing the electoral law, its platform, or from splitting or coalescing. The results show that while there are games with no institutional or coalitional-split equilibria, such equilibria do exist under relatively undemanding conditions. The main finding is that once an institutional and identity equilibrium is achieved, it is generically robust against small trembles in party platforms or voter preferences. This robustness facilitates greater stability in terms of institutions and party identities in mature party systems where such trembles are smaller than in transitional systems.

Multi-Party Competition: A Computational Model with Abstention and Biased Voters

This paper analyses the properties of a computational model of multi-party competition in two and three policy dimensions. We present four substantive results: Firstly, centrifugal incentives prevent rational parties from moving to the mean of voters' preference distributions. Secondly, the number of parties competing for votes and the inclination to abstain from voting are positively related to parties' optimum distance to the political centre. Thirdly, the number of parties in the political arena also increases both the distance between parties' location in the policy space and the inter-temporal volatility of their platforms. Finally, assuming that voters rely on past observations of partisan positioning behaviour in order to assess the credibility of parties, this memory of a party's record is positively related to both the distances between partisan platforms and their deviation from the mean of voters' preferences but has a dampening effect for platform volatility.

Nepal: Between Dictatorship and Anarchy

By any measure, Nepal's experience with democratization has been a tragic failure. Despite a 1990 popular revolution and the king's subse- quent embrace of what looked like a serious attempt to introduce multiparty competition to the world's only officially Hindu divine- right monarchy, recent Nepalese history has been fraught with instability and strife. A decade-old Maoist insurgency has left more than 11,000 people dead and effectively denied the government's writ across huge swaths of the kingdom's 140,000 square kilometers. Throughout the 1990s, one frail government after another fumbled while the country's economic and political problems grew worse. The royal household suf- fered a tragic blow in 2001 when the crown prince gunned down ten relatives including the king before killing himself. Then in February 2005 the current holder of the throne, Gyanendra, carried out a self- coup. His dismissal of the legislature and seizure of power mean that Nepal now finds itself, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, mired that much more deeply in a strange and bloody battle between the op- posed and yet similarly antidemocratic ideologies of communism and royal absolutism. While Nepal has long been among the world's poorest nations, is home to an array of distinct ethnolinguistic and religious groups, and is wracked by a violent insurgency, neither the country's poverty nor its diversity nor the armed Maoist campaign suffices to explain Nepal's failure to make serious progress toward liberal democracy. Neighboring India is a variegated society where widespread want has long been a Sumit Ganguly is director of the India Studies Program and Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University. He is the author of Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (with Devin Hagerty, 2005). Brian Shoup is a doctoral candidate in political science at Indiana University.

Thinking Inside the Box: A Closer Look at Democracy and Human Rights

Research on human rights consistently points to the importance of democracy in reducing the severity and incidence of personal integrity abuses. The prescriptive implications of this finding for policy makers interested in state building have been somewhat limited, however, by a reliance on multidimensional measures of democracy. Consequently, a policy maker emerges from this literature confident that “democracy matters” but unclear about which set(s) of reforms is likely to yield a greater human rights payoff. Using data from the Polity IV Project, we examine what aspects of democracy are most consequential in improving a state's human rights record. Analysis of democracy's dimensions elicits three findings. First, political participation at the level of multiparty competition appears more significant than other dimensions in reducing human rights abuses. Second, improvements in a state's level of democracy short of full democracy do not promote greater respect for integrity rights. Only those states with the highest levels of democracy, not simply those conventionally defined as democratic, are correlated with better human rights practices. Third, accountability appears to be the critical feature that makes full-fledged democracies respect human rights; limited accountability generally retards improvement in human rights.

Multiparty Competition in Israel, 1988–96

Formal models of voting usually assume that political agents, whether parties or candidates, attempt to maximize expected vote shares. ‘Stochastic’ models typically derive the ‘mean voter theorem’ that each agent will adopt a ‘convergent’ policy strategy at the mean of the electoral distribution. In this article, it is argued that this conclusion is contradicted by empirical evidence. Estimates of vote intentions require ‘valence’ terms. The valence of each party derives from the average weight, given by members of the electorate, in judging the overall competence or ‘quality’ of the particular party leader. In empirical models, a party's valence is independent of current policy declarations and can be shown to be statistically significant in the estimation. It is shown here that the addition of valence gives a very strong Bayes factor over an electoral model without valence. The formal model is analysed and shown to be classified by a ‘convergence’ coefficient, defined in terms of the parameters of the empirical model. This coefficient gives necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence. When the necessary condition fails, as it does in these empirical studies with valence, then the convergent equilibrium fails to exist. The empirical evidence is consistent with a formal stochastic model of voting in which there are multiple local Nash equilibria to the vote-maximizing electoral game. Simulation techniques based on the parameters of the empirical model have been used to obtain these local equilibria, which are determined by the principal component of the electoral distribution. Low valence parties, in equilibrium, will tend to adopt positions at the electoral periphery. High valence parties will contest the electoral centre, but will not, in fact, position themselves at the electoral mean. Survey data from Israel for the elections of 1988, 1992 and 1996 are used to compute the parameters of the empirical model and to illustrate the dependence of equilibria on the electoral principal components. The vote maximizing equilibria do not perfectly coincide with the actual party positions. This divergence may be accounted for by more refined models that either (i) include activism or (ii) consider strategic party considerations over post-election coalition bargaining.

The Strategic Implications of Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Middle East

The expansion of democracy in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia over the last 30 years has spurred extensive debate on the internal and external factors that facilitate political reform. In this context, many observers view the greater Middle East and Islamic world as an anomaly in that authoritarian rule continues to dominate, albeit in varying degrees. The spread of democracy elsewhere set in motion internal reforms that contributed to greater openness and multiparty competition in the Middle East during the 1990s. Ultimately, the drive toward more substantive reform was cut short, as incumbent leaders did not risk endangering their positions by embarking on genuine democratization processes. (1) Despite the end of the Soviet threat, US relations toward the Middle East continued to be driven by Cold War calculations. Supporting and guaranteeing the security of friendly autocratic regimes to ensure access to the region's energy resources and favorable pricing mechanisms, containing the rise of regional powers with the potential to threaten US interests, deterring aspiring powers such as a revamped Russia, China, and even Europe from gaining a foothold in the region, supporting Israel as a surrogate of US power and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, nonproliferation, Islamic radicalism, and terrorism took precedence over all else. In contrast, Washington paid scant attention to the question of democracy in the region--or lack thereof--adopting a markedly different approach compared to its engagement of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Latin America, East Asia, and sub-Sahara Africa. This posture exemplifies the ongoing dilemma facing American Presidents of whether to subjugate realist-based interests to Washington's democratic ideals. The 9/11 tragedy forced Washington to reevaluate its posture toward the region. The attacks amplified the threat of international terrorism unlike ever before and highlighted the deep-seated anger, frustration, and resentment harbored by millions of Muslims and the extreme lengths to which a minority of radicals would to go to further their cause. Rooting out and killing terrorists everywhere emerged as a pillar of America's post-9/11 national security strategy. (2) Draining the Swamp In addition to initiating an aggressive strategy that attacks terrorists and their sponsors, the Bush Administration determined that the long-term defense of the American homeland rests on draining the pool of recruits available to organizations such as al Qaeda by eliminating the conditions that breed extremism. Washington attributes the spread of Islamic radicalism to the persistence of authoritarianism in the Middle East. It acknowledges that the status quo in the region is illegitimate, unacceptable, and unsustainable, given the failure of incumbent autocratic regimes to address social and economic problems and meet the basic demands of their citizens. As a consequence, the issues of reform and democracy were elevated to a level of critical importance. (3) In doing so, the Administration reversed a pillar of American policy predicated on the notion that pro-US authoritarian regimes served to protect against radicalism and terrorism. Traditional US policy toward the region was meant to ensure stability and enhance American security. The 9/11 attacks proved the opposite. Indeed, promoting democracy has become a strategic imperative in the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. This strategy marks a dramatic shift from longstanding American policy, at least in rhetoric. Washington is accustomed to dealing with compliant authoritarian regimes in places such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, all staunch allies that flout public opinion when it comes to maintaining close ties to the United States. (4) In contrast, citizens in democracies can think and act freely in that they can question their leaders and hold them to account without fear. …

The Emergence of Multiparty Competition in Mexican Politics. PATRICIA HUESCA-DORANTES Ashgate, England 2003.

Cuando uno ve un libro que pretende aplicar una metodología innovadora en la Ciencia Política, es inevitable preguntarse que es lo que quiere demostrar y en este caso, con el uso de modelaje matemático, uno pretendería encontrar un enfoque que facilite analizar a la política mexicana desde un nuevo punto de vista, sin embargo, la profusión de cuadros solamente ratifican lo que uno encuentra en muchos otros autores y sin embargo, al final uno encuentra verdades de perogrullo, como: "El aumento en el apoyo a un partido está directamente relacionado al decremento al apoyo a otro partido".

Multi-Party Competition: A Stochastic Equilibrium Analysis

This paper analyzes the properties of a computational model of multi-party competition in two and three policy dimensions. We present four substantive results: Firstly, centrifugal incentives prevent rational parties from moving to the mean of voters' preference distributions. Secondly, the number of parties competing for votes and the inclination to abstain from voting are positively related to parties' optimal distance to the political center. Thirdly, the number of parties in the political arena also increases both the distance between parties' location in the policy space and the inter-temporal volatility of their platforms. Finally, assuming that voters rely on past observations of partisan positioning behavior in order to assess the credibility of parties, this memory of a party's record is positively related to both the distances between partisan platforms and their deviation from the mean of voters' preferences but has a dampening effect for platform volatility. We arrive at these results despite the absence of unique Nash-equilibria. Drawing on the notion of stochastic equilibria, we assess the model's properties by analyzing the data generated by the simulation with standard statistical means. We show that the results are robust to changes in assumptions about the dimensionality of political competition as well as to the use of alternative statistical methods. We conclude by outlining possible avenues of testing our results against empirical data drawn for real world partisan competition.

Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where “weak institutions” may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game‐theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization.

State Militarism and Its Legacies: Why Military Reform Has Failed in Russia

political system have undergone enormous changes since the end of the Soviet era. A burgeoning market system has replaced the Soviet command economy, and open multiparty competition for representation in Russia’s political institutions operates in place of the Communist Party that ruled the country exclusively for more than 60 years. In the areas of defense and security, however, radical changes to the organizational and operational system inherited from the Soviet Union have yet to occur. After more than a decade of reform efforts, Russia’s armed forces have shrunk to less than two-thirds of their 1992 size of 3.7 million.1 Russia’s military leaders, nevertheless, have been adamant about preserving Soviet-era force structures and strategic plans. Why have Russia’s armed forces—nearly alone among the core institutions of the Russian state— resisted efforts to change their structure and character in accordance with institutional arrangements operative in Western liberal democracies? This question is all the more bafoing because Russia’s military has been mired in an institutional crisis that predates the 1991 Soviet collapse. Currently, the Russian military is laboring under conditions of acute infrastructure decay and extreme shortages of equipment, a recruitment crisis exacerbated by a dysfunctional conscription system and the exodus of junior ofacers, a lack of combat-ready forces for deployment to the ongoing conoict in Chechnya, and force structures and strategies that are woefully inadequate to address the country’s security threats. As during the Cold War, the military persists in preparing for large-scale war against a formidable enemy (or enemies) while failing to develop its capacity to manage smaller regional conoicts and threats from nonstate actors, even as the conoict in Chechnya enters its eleventh year.

Comparing and Contrasting the Uses of Two Graphical Tools for Displaying Patterns of Multiparty Competition

We compare two tools for displaying, in graphical form, information about vote outcomes in multiparty elections at the constituency level. One was recently proposed by Nagayama and introduced to the English-speaking world by Reed, who applied this method to Japanese and Italian election data. Reed labels the method Nagayama diagrams. Recently, Taagepera has shown how the domain of potential uses of Nagayama diagrams can be expanded significantly. A second graphical device has been used by a number of authors for various types of election analyses, but is not that well known in the comparative parties literature. This method, which uses barycentric coordinates (i.e. triangular) rather than the more familiar rectangular coordinates, has gone under a variety of names (e.g. trilinear plot, toroidal diagram and simplex representation), but we have chosen to use the last of these labels. We make use of both methods to visually present election data (by constituency) for the Italian national elections of 1994, 1996 and 2001. We show how different types of information may be readily gleaned from the two types of graph, and, perhaps most importantly, illustrate how we may improve the ready intuitive interpretability of each type of graph by specifying boundary constraints to define particular regions of the graph – a technique we call ‘segmentation’.

Redistribution under proportional representation

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between proportional representation voting system and the size of government via its effects on political equilibrium. The multiparty spatial competition on tax-transfer policy and the post-electoral coalition formation are examined. The implemented policy does not necessarily reflect the median voter’s preference, ranging from laissez-faire to a redistributive economy according to income distribution. It can even reflect the preference of the lower income class in spite of equal income distribution, leading to the large-scale redistribution. Our results can explain the heterogeneous sizes of government observed among European proportional representation democracies.

Change in Uganda: A New Opening?

Abstract: Over the last 18 years, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) under the leadership of President Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda on the basis of a “non-party” semi-authoritarian regime. Since the beginning of 2003, they have been compelled to open the system up to uncontrolled multiparty competition. A number of factors explain this shift. including the persistence of opposition insurgency; the continuing opposition of the country’s two traditional parties; movement towards political pluralism in the two neighboring states with which Uganda has intimate economic, cultural and political relations; and the larger global political environment that continues to delegitimize authoritarian or even semi-authoritarian regimes. However, the ongoing processes of change are fraught with a great deal of uncertainties.