Multiparty Democracies Research Articles

The Length of Service of Cabinet Ministers in Chile's Presidential Democracy, 1990–2022

Cabinet shuffles in multiparty democracies do not equally affect all posts as they are caused by changes in the composition of government coalitions and by shifting political conditions. With data from the 340 individual cabinet appointments in Chile's presidential system in seven presidential terms (1990–2022), we find that the type of cabinet position and prior experience as cabinet ministers impact the length of service, but party members do not last longer than independents and neither do ministers with technocratic credentials. Ministers in low‐prestige positions are less likely to being sacked. As cabinet stability is associated with the delivery of public policies, studying the determinants of longer cabinet positions helps identify factors that contribute to governability and good governance.

Governance beyond the ballot: Norms, populism, and post-election preferences

Governance beyond the ballot: Norms, populism, and post-election preferences In this article, Mariken A.C.G. van der Velden, Professor of Political Communication at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, explores citizens’ preferences for government formation. When comparing proportional voting systems with majoritarian ones, scholars often highlight that the former frequently yield inconclusive election outcomes, wherein politicians, rather than voters, determine the composition of the governing parties. In multiparty democracies, post- election discussions among parties with divergent preferences generally lead to the necessity of compromising on a shared coalition agreement to establish a government. Nevertheless, due to the compromises inherent in coalitions, some critics may label them as undemocratic. In the present day, both analysts and academics acknowledge prolonged delays in the establishment of coalition governments within Europe. For example, the 2021 Dutch election triggered an unprecedentedly protracted government negotiation process, culminating in a government that collapsed after eighteen months.

Polarisation, identity and affect - conceptualising affective polarisation in multi-party systems

This paper aims to contribute to the nascent field of research on affective polarisation in liberal democracies by reflecting on the conceptual ambiguities as well as potentials inherent in the concept. Based on a systematic, critical review of 78 articles, I discuss three main ambiguities in the current literature on affective polarisation in multi-party democracies. Those concern firstly, the object of dislike; secondly, the nature of dislike; and thirdly, how to make sense of the concept of “polarisation” in the context of affective polarisation. I then propose to use the existing ambiguities as a basis to work towards a more nuanced conceptualisation of affective polarisation which allows us to distinguish it from neighbouring concepts and to further differentiate between different constellations and degrees of affective polarisation. I conclude by arguing in favour of taking a broader approach to studying affective polarisation than done so far, and by suggesting some directions for future research.

The electoral consequences of policy-making in coalition governments

Does policy-making in coalition governments affect cabinet parties’ electoral performance? Previous research shows that about two thirds of all propositions promised in coalition agreements are actually enacted. But does non-compliance with pledges made in the agreement affect subsequent electoral support? Drawing on the literature on performance voting, we expect that non-compliance is punished by voters, but the effect is conditioned by the importance of the issue and by a parties’ seniority status within the coalition. To test our argument, we have compiled the new comparative COALITIONPOLICY dataset on the enactment of more than 7000 policy pledges by 217 cabinet parties in 19 Western and Eastern European countries from 2000 to 2015. Across a broad range of models, we find no effect of pledge fulfillment on subsequent electoral performance. If anything, adherence to policy-promises only increases support for the prime minister party. These results have important implications for our understanding of political representation, coalition governance, and electoral competition in multiparty democracies.

Camps, not just parties. The dynamic foundations of affective polarization in multi-party systems

Concerns over affective polarization in Western democracies are growing. But which broader political distinctions are also affective demarcations? As inter-party cooperation is the rule in multi-party democracies, explaining affective polarization beyond partisan divisions is crucial. I argue that demarcations between political camps deepen affective polarization, and country-level factors influence the relevance of these affective divides. Based on survey data from 23 Western democracies (1996–2019), I demonstrate that affect is most polarized between Left and Right camps, and between the Radical Right and other camps. Further, these divides are dynamic and depend on different country-level outcomes. The Left/Right divide disappears when Left and Right parties govern together, while the Radical Right divide is fortified with Radical Right electoral success. These findings highlight that affective polarization’s group foundations extend beyond partisanship, and that affective polarization could even act as a defence mechanism against radical challengers.

Multi-ethnic vision or ethnic nationalism? The contested legacies of Anderson Mazoka and Zambia’s 2006 election

ABSTRACT Studies on elections in Africa’s multiparty democracies stress the role of “incumbency advantages” in the re-election of presidents. While this blanket explanation holds true for the most part, it does not cover the successes of incumbents in polls conducted with minimal levels of clientelism and manipulation. Using the example of Zambia’s 2006 election, this paper shows how incumbents in multi-ethnic societies attempt to build a winning coalition through effective appeals to ethnic inclusion. After the main opposition leader Anderson Mazoka died four months before the election, President Levy Mwanawasa appropriated Mazoka’s legacy as a politician committed to ethnic inclusion. He successfully presented himself in non-ethnic terms, accused his rivals of being tribalists and urged voters to reject them. Mwanawasa won over key sections of the opposition’s base and an election he was widely expected to lose, demonstrating the value of studying the role of individual political leadership in incumbent-party hegemony.

Proches, mais différents. Les transitions de l’Europe du Sud des années 1970 revisitées

The idea that Portugal, Greece and Spain shared a model of transition from dictatorship to democracy has been proposed, criticised and revived several times in the past four decades. After a survey of the criteria found in the literature, this article develops a comparative exploration of the three transitions guided by the definition of democracy as an effective system of government built upon the rule of the people, operationalised in three key dimensions. The first one is the reconfiguration of the people by means of the redefinition of the boundaries and contents of the nation. The second is the means deployed to express and channel the political preferences of the population, including elections, referenda and demonstrations. The final dimension is the transformation of the policing apparatus that contributes to make government effective. There were important differences in the direction of change and the centrality of the elements of these three dimensions, especially regarding the choices concering the redefinition of the national community, the use of referenda and the urgency of police reform. However, the three countries successfully became multi-party democracies, suggesting that even if not every path opened ahead for each country would have resulted in democracy, democracy was the possible outcome of many different sets of collective and individual choices.

Political compromises: A double edge sword

Political compromises: A double edge sword Associate Professor Mariken A.C.G. van der Velden at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam discusses how political compromises can hinder affect a functioning democracy. Key to a functioning representative democracy is political parties competing based on alternative policy ideas to improve society during campaigning periods and the very same political parties cooperating outside these campaign times. While this holds for all forms of democracy, the tension between conflict and cooperation is particularly acute in Europe's multiparty democracies with coalition governments.

Multipolar social systems: Measuring polarization beyond dichotomous contexts

Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus hurts democratic societies. Polarization has been traditionally studied in binary conflicts where two groups support opposite ideas. However, in many social systems, such as multi-party democracies, political conflicts involve multiple dissenting factions. Despite the prevalence of multipolar systems, there is still a lack of suitable analytical tools to study their polarization patterns. In this work, we introduce new polarization metrics for multidimensional scenarios and develop a methodology that extracts the ideological structure of multipolar contexts from social networks. We propose the trace of the covariance matrix (the total variation) of the multipolar opinion distribution as a measure of global polarization, and its eigendecomposition to identify the directions of maximum polarization. Instead of using a pre-conceived opinion space (conservative vs progressive, liberal vs authoritarian, etc.), our framework reveals the natural ideological axes of the system. We apply our methodology to quadripolar and pentapolar real-world democratic processes, finding non-trivial ideological structures with clear connections to the underlying social context. Our framework opens new avenues for understanding multilateral social tensions and facing the challenges of polarization in a unified way.

Policy signals and strategic voting for minor parties: Evidence from Germany

How does executive power-sharing in multiparty democracies influence voter decision-making? The current scholarship has identified two strategies that voters use to target coalitions and that involve voting for a minor party: Coalition insurance voting and compensatory voting. Yet these strategies are not differentiated conceptually, and empirically, are observationally equivalent. By foregrounding the role of policy signals in strategic voting for minor parties, the present study disentangles these strategies at the theoretical and empirical levels. It also proposes a new, hybrid, strategy. To do so, it uses data on the 2013 and 2017 German federal elections from campaign-period surveys, polls and an original dataset of the candidates’ tweets about policy issues. The results show evidence of policy-driven voters using a hybrid strategy in 2013 and a compensatory strategy in 2017. There is no evidence of coalition insurance voting in these elections.

Ten years after: Is the party-centered theory of campaign professionalization still valid?

This study tests the explanatory strength of the party-centered theory of electoral campaign professionalism. The theory was previously subject to testing in various types of elections during the first decade of the new millennium, covering Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. Nevertheless, empirical research in this field has been on hold for almost a decade, obstructing the development of the theory during a time when politics and political campaigns have taken new paths. In this article, the theory is revisited, presenting results from a unique time series study covering 48 party campaigns between 2009 and 2019 in three consecutive European parliamentary elections in two multiparty democracies, Sweden and Finland. Our results provide weak support for the party-centered theory of campaign professionalism in the form it was originally operationalized. Only a centralized party organization and a large support base with a catch-all strategy were found to be statistically significant predictors of campaign professionalism.

Affective blocs: Understanding affective polarization in multiparty systems

Research has suggested that affective polarization (AP)—the extent to which partisans view each other as a disliked out-group—has increased, especially in two-party political systems such as in the US. The understanding of AP in multiparty systems remains limited. We study AP in Finland, characterized by a strong multiparty system and a low level of ideological polarization, between 2007 and 2019. We find that AP has increased, driven mainly by voters evaluating their least favorite party more negatively. We also propose an approach that goes beyond earlier literature, which has mostly used a single aggregate metric to measure AP. Using latent profile analysis, we find that voters are grouped into blocs that view some parties positively and others negatively. This suggests that the complex dynamics of AP in multiparty democracies involve relationships between not just individual parties but between what we call affective blocs that span across party lines.

Less Populist in Power? Online Communication of Populist Parties in Coalition Governments

AbstractRecently several populist parties have become part of coalition governments in multiparty democracies, specifically in Western Europe. Based on the inclusion-moderation thesis, academics assume that incumbent populist parties tone down their populist rhetoric as a result of the daily businesses of deliberation and compromises in coalitions. However, while the assumption of tamed populists in power is widespread, there is little empirical work dealing with the topic. Using a classical quantitative content analysis of 1,210 Facebook posts published by populist parties in Italy, Spain, Austria and New Zealand, this article examines whether opposition parties are more populist and nativist than those in coalition governments. The findings indicate that populists do not decrease the degree of anti-elite and people-centred messages when they are in power but rather change the type of elites they attack and the antagonist groups they juxtapose. We should therefore rethink the validity of the inclusion-moderation thesis for populist parties in coalition governments.

Disseminating legislative debates: How legislators communicate the parliamentary agenda.

While a rich literature addresses legislative agenda-setting in multiparty democracies, relatively little is known how members of parliament disseminate the legislative agenda beyond the parliamentary floor. Drawing on content analyses of 110 legislative debates and 5,847 press releases from Austrian MPs (2013–2017), we test whether legislators are more likely to send press releases on issues that are salient to their party (party agenda-setting) and to other parties in the party system (systemic salience). MPs should also communicate more on issues that fall within their area of expertise (issue specialization) and when they have given a speech on that issue during the legislative debate (intra-party delegation). While we find empirical support for all these expectations, communication of the legislative agenda largely rests on each parties’ issue specialists and their speakers in plenary debates. Importantly, there is no significant discrepancy overall between the actual parliamentary issue agenda and the agenda communicated by party MPs.

A General Approach to Measuring Electoral Competitiveness for Parties and Governments

AbstractWe develop a general approach to measuring electoral competitiveness for parties and governments, which is distinct from existing approaches in two ways. First, it allows us to estimate the actual probability of re-electing the incumbent into office, which lies closer to the theoretical concept of interest than most widely used proxies. Second, it incorporates both pre-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty about the outcome of the upcoming election—and post-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty concerning who will form the government given a certain election result. The approach can be applied to, and compared across, a multitude of institutional settings and is particularly advantageous in analyses of multiparty democracies. To demonstrate its full potential, we first apply the approach on 1,700 local government elections in Sweden. Three advantages over existing approaches are documented: Our election probability measure shows substantial variation over the election cycle, it can be accurately measured for a single party as well as a government, and it is more capable of predicting re-election into office than any previous measure of electoral competitiveness. A second application on 400 national elections in 34 democracies shows that the approach also works well in a more challenging cross-national setting.

Issue Engagement Across Members of Parliament: The Role of Issue Specialization and Party Leadership

Studies on political communication in multiparty democracies usually focus on political parties as unitary actors and how they engage with each other in election campaigns. We deviate from this approach and study how issue engagement (i.e., the degree to which party actors address the same issues) varies across members of parliament. We argue that MPs’ role in parliament affects how they engage with other legislators. In particular, we expect an intraparty division of labor, where each party’s policy specialists address the same issues. Moreover, party front benchers have a distinct way of communicating: they are more likely to engage with other party leaders rather than with policy specialists of rival parties. Using spatial lag models based on approximately 15,000 press releases by Austrian MPs, we find empirical support for these expectations. Our findings show the limitations of the “unitary actor” approach for studying issue engagement in European party systems.

Voting with the shilling: The 'Money Talks Factor' in Kenya's Public Policy and Electoral Democracy

The influence of money in elections has become an important ingredient in determining electoral outcomes worldwide. The use of money in political activities has adversely affected the nature of public policy, governance, competition, the rule of law, transparency, equity and democracy. Although there are laws, policies and guidelines governing the use of money during elections, there is little political will to implement them. This paper examines how money, or the lack thereof, determines electoral outcomes in multi-party democracies with a focus on Kenya, employing both the hydraulic theory and the push-and-pull paradigm. The study found that in most cases, victory in elections follows those with money; in other cases, it is the potential for victory that attracts money from self-interested donors. The study calls on electoral bodies such as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission to honour their mandate and demand compliance with set laws and regulations in a bid to entrench governance and create a level playing field for contestants.

Understanding the “Micro” in Micro-Targeting: An Analysis of Facebook Digital Advertising in the 2019 Federal Canadian Election

In the aftermath of the scandals involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, there is now global attention to the nature of the data-driven election and the effects of political micro-targeting on campaigning practices and the integrity of our democratic systems. Political micro-targeting arguably serves to fragment political discourse, to accentuate “wedge issues”, to promote “filter bubbles” and leads to a transactional politics where localized claims and promises remain unchallenged. There are macro-consequences of micro-targeting. Still, we contend that the concept of political micro-targeting is vaguely used, poorly understood, and only sparsely studied outside the U.S. This paper analyzes the actual practice of micro-targeting in the 2019 Canadian federal election. The Canadian case holds some important lessons for other parliamentary, multi-party democracies. What does micro-targeting look like to the average voter in Canada? How “micro” is indeed the micro-targeting? The literature tends to assume that political micro-targeting requires a precisely segmented audience, a specific location, and, most importantly a focussed policy message. If so, then how much political micro-targeting actually occurs in Canadian elections? We analyzed a sample of ads (from the Facebook ad library) delivered on two critical dates during the 2019 federal election. We found that only a small minority (7%) met these criteria. Most ads critically lacked precision on one, or two, of these critical variables. Although we did not find widespread use of insidious ad variation witnessed in U.S. elections, we did find visible examples of A/B testing, in which the font, image, or iteration of a certain message shifted from ad to ad. However, to the extent that claims about policies or issues were made, they were generally pitched at a relatively abstract policy level. There is a confusion, therefore, between the obscure micro-targeting processes used by Facebook and the visible manifestation of the ads to the average voter. Although the Facebook political ad library provides access to unprecedented levels of information about political digital advertising in Canada, it is still very difficult to determine why people were selected to receive the advertisements that they did. Our findings suggest a more nuanced understanding of the practice, as well as a higher level of transparency, not only for the social media platforms but also for the data analytics performed through the political parties' voter relationship management systems. Ultimately, we need a more refined, and nuanced, understanding of the different levels of micro-targeting experienced in Canadian elections. Not all micro-targeting carries the same precision. And not all raise the same concerns about electoral manipulation and propaganda.

The impact of independent members of parliament in multi-party democracies : the Ugandan case

The impact of independent members of parliament in multi-party democracies : the Ugandan case

Coalitions: Coalition probabilities in multi-party democracies

coalitions: Coalition probabilities in multi-party democracies