National Parliamentary Elections Research Articles

Who gains from apparentments under D’Hondt?

Apparentments – or coalitions of several electoral lists – are a widely neglected aspect of the study of proportional electoral systems. This paper proposes a formal model that explains the benefits political parties derive from apparentments, based on their alliance strategies and relative size. In doing so, it reveals that apparentments are most beneficial for highly fractionalised political blocs. However, it also emerges that large parties stand to gain much more from apparentments than small parties do. Because of this, small parties are likely to join in apparentments with other small parties, excluding large parties where possible. These arguments are tested empirically, using a new dataset from the Swiss national parliamentary elections covering a period from 1995 to 2007.

Global Patterns of Virtual Mudslinging?The Use of Attacks on German Party Websites in State, National and European Parliamentary Elections

Is negative campaigning on the internet an American phenomenon or an international trend? To explore this question, this article compares the use of attacks on German party websites in two state elections, one federal election and one election to the European parliament with recent American evidence. The results show that virtual mudslinging has affected German e-campaigns at all levels of the political system, with patterns similar to those found in the United States. This includes the amount and frequency of the attacks as well as their differential usage by incumbents and challengers, their respective sources, and the subject dimensions of the assaults. Only with regard to the thematic context and the targets of the attacks did German and American e-campaigns vary in their style of online negativism. These findings support the notion of a global standardisation effect in web campaign practices brought about by the professionalisation process in politics.

Public images of leaders of anti-immigration parties: Perceptions of legitimacy and effectiveness

In the last two decades several anti-immigration parties have risen in Western Europe. Some of these parties have been very successful in elections, whereas others have been rather unsuccessful. Some scholars have argued that this success depends in part on the extent to which voters perceive these parties (and their leaders) as legitimate (not violent or undemocratic) and as effective. However, no studies exist that test the effect of these public perceptions on electoral support. We fill this void by proposing operationalizations of voters’ perceptions of parties in terms of legitimacy and effectiveness. These operationalizations were employed to measure public perceptions of leaders of two anti-immigration parties and leaders of four established parties that participated in the Dutch national parliamentary elections of 2006. The analyses of these data (n = 382) demonstrate the significance of measuring public images directly and show that legitimacy and effectiveness are important predictors of support for anti-immigration parties. Prior research showed that voters evaluate anti-immigration parties largely by the same criteria as they use to evaluate other parties. Our study demonstrates that this is only true when voters consider an anti-immigration party as effective and legitimate.

Candidates in Parliamentary Elections: Analysis of the Preferential Voting in the Elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2006

The paper deals with the issue of the "candidate effect" within the proportional electoral system. The basic database consists of the total count and the share of preferential votes won by the candidates listed as first on party ballots in the Czech national parliamentary elections in June 2006. These election results, which are analyzed in the following text, are limited only to the ballots of those political parties that won seats in the Chamber of Deputies (that is, CSSD, KDU-CSL, KSCM, ODS, SZ). Individual outputs are based on a comparison of the election results for particular candidates in their electoral districts, in relation to their positions on the party ballots.

Nacionales y gremialistas: El “parto” de la nueva derecha política chilena, 1964 – 1973

Nacionales y gremialistas: El “parto” de la nueva derecha política chilena, 1964 – 1973

Can the Internet Increase Political Participation? An Analysis of Remote Electronic Voting’s Effect on Turnout

There are far-reaching expectations that electronic democracy will increase political participation, and include previously underrepresented groups in politics. So far, however, there is little empirical evidence to monitor such trends. In 2007, Estonia became the first country to organize national parliamentary elections in which all voters had a choice of casting their vote at traditional polls, or over the Internet. This study analyses individual data from a special survey of 1000 respondents, as well as aggregated election results for, the 234 Estonia municipalities. Instead of attracting new voters, it seems, Internet voting mostly substituted for existing votes at the polls. Furthermore instead of attracting social groups that usually abstain from elections, Internet voting has for the most part attracted the same politically well-established groups. Finally, it seems that the effects of this new voting technology are not politically neutral: Internet voters favoured political parties that receive strong support from the ethnic majority and from wealthy areas. If it is to have any effect on political participation, Internet voting seems poised to increase inequalities, rather than level them.

The Electronic State: Estonia’s New Media Revolution

This article examines the case of Estonia as one of Europe’s fastest growing informational economies, and asks whether its furious development of new media technologies, as industrial products, commercial resources and political instruments, has necessarily proven as beneficial to society at large as some domestic and international commentators have anticipated. After mapping Estonia’s unique development in embracing new technologies since the mid-1990s, the article concludes with a study of Estonia’s recent experiments in electronic voting: in 2007, Estonia was lauded as the first country in the world to afford voters at national parliamentary elections the opportunity to vote online from their homes. The article is based on a series of interviews conducted by the author with a number of prominent figures in Estonia’s IT industry, private and voluntary sectors, government service and politics. It addresses issues arising out of academic literature relating to the ethical, social and political aspects of the proliferation of new media, within the context of related surveys and reports produced by governmental and transnational organisations.

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-Ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties

Does contact between ethnic groups lead to greater support for liberal parties? Research on this debate in the U.S. context is contaminated by high levels of mobility and a truncated party palette. This paper addresses the problem through an examination of the 1929 and 1935 national parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, where mobility was limited and the spectrum of parties was broad. We employ ecological inference on an original database of election and census results for several thousand municipalities to estimate ethnic group support for liberal and nonliberal parties across a variety of local demographic configurations. The results show that interethnic contact has indeterminate electoral effects: no uniform pattern of support for liberal parties exists either across or within ethnic groups. The electoral impact of contact depends upon the peculiarities of the group being studied and the national demographic context under which contact occurs. In and of itself, contact between ethnic groups breeds neither amity nor contempt.

Performing Politics: The 2007 Parliamentary Elections in Timor Leste

The 2007 national parliamentary elections in East Timor attracted high voter participation and was widely and favourably reported, but when the successful poll flared into violent post-election conflict, the possibility of realising political stability and national unity is again called into question. Despite the emergence of new political parties and a growing population of young aspirational Timorese voters who are shifting the grounds of political representation and rhetoric, the nation remains mired in unresolved enmities and leadership failings. This paper reflects on the political campaign and election results in Timor Leste's stumbling progress towards a stable democratic future.

The dog that didn't bark: Would increased electoral turnout make a difference?

The question of whether increased electoral turnout would make a difference has long been a matter of interest to psephologists and laymen alike. Several approaches to this question have been employed, one of which has been an analysis of responses to survey questions about how non-voters would have voted had they actually voted. The problem with this approach is not only that it involves responses to a hypothetical question, but also that the responses are given after the election outcome is known and hence are subject to the impact of various post-election effects – “bandwagon effects” in particular. In the present article an alternative approach based on an analysis of party sympathy scores is pursued. Party sympathy scores are calculated among voters and non-voters alike. On the basis of this information, an algorithm is then used to estimate what percentage of potential voters were “lost” by the failure of different parties to mobilize non-voters with sympathy scores comparable to their voters, and thereby assess the impact of non-voting on the election outcome. Analyses are carried out using data from six national parliamentary elections held in Norway in the period from 1981 to 2001. Results indicate that the impact of higher levels of turnout is marginal at best.

Of Separate and Joint Universes: National Parliamentary Elections in Israel and Palestine

While on the political level, Israel and Palestine seem to have entered separate universes, the dynamics of institutional politics, with no little subtlety, have conjoined both nations. Due to the ...

Duverger's equilibrium under limited competition: Russia's parliamentary elections

In the summer of 2005 Russia reformed the mixed electoral system that was used for national parliamentary elections to the Duma (the lower chamber of parliament) in 1993–2003. In the old mixed-memb...

Regional cleavages in Turkish politics: An electoral geography of the 1999 and 2002 national elections

Abstract The 1999 and 2002 national parliamentary elections in Turkey display similar patterns of regional political affiliation. Integrating theories of political cleavages with the techniques of electoral geography, this article examines the overlapping cultural and economic constitution of these patterns. Cleavage theories have lacked an explicitly spatial connection between the divisions investigated and the populations these divisions are supposed to represent. Adding this connection and a more significant consideration of the impacts of state administration on these divisions expands cleavage theory's usefulness for electoral geography. In the case of Turkey, cluster analyses of the provincial results from each election display a strong tri-partite regionalization within the electoral geography of the country. By comparing the levels of support for different parties in each region with their respective political platforms, it is found that four major divisions are shaping the electoral geography: religion, ethnicity, regional economic prosperity, and previous state association. This phenomenon is explained in part by the repressive surveillance of a military apparatus that is both secular and Turkish nationalist in orientation and the dependent position of Turkey as a non-core state within the global economic system.

When the Central Player Fails: Constraints on Cabinet Formation in Contemporary India

From the first post–independence election in 1952 until the general elections of 1989, the Indian National Congress party won a plurality of the votes and a majority of the legislative seats in every national parliamentary election except for the one that was held in 1977. Although the party maintained its dominant position in the national party system for almost four decades, starting in 1967 it gradually lost it at the subnational level. Finally, the 1989 national election brought Congress dominance to a definite end in the national party system as well. Since 1989, Congress has neither remained the consistently strongest electoral party nor has it won a parliamentary majority in any single election.

MONGOLIA IN 2000 The Pendulum Swings Again

Mongolia in 2000 saw a political sandstorm befitting the Gobi Desert. When the dust settled toward the year’s end, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), formerly the Communist Party, had wrested four years of political power away from the Democratic Coalition by winning both the national parliamentary elections in July and the countrywide local legislative elections in October. The elections were free and open, the transfer of power was peaceful, and Mongolians and foreign observers were left waiting to see what the new government will do. During the winter of 1999–2000, the country also suffered a terrible natural calamity in the form of a cold freeze called the dzud during which 2.6 million head of livestock died, affecting the lives of thousands of herders who depend on animals for their livelihood. Concerns about corruption, poverty, unemployment, crime, alcoholism, domestic violence, street children, health and education, and other issues continue. The new government plans to focus heavily on such social and economic concerns. The major foreign policy event of the year was the visit of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Still unresolved at the end of 2000 is the two-year-old assassination in 1998 of S. Zorig, one of the founders of Mongolia’s democracy movenment and one of the country’s chief architects and leaders after that.

Regional Patterns of Political Preference in Russia: The December 1999 Duma Elections

Two specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia analyze the spatial voting patterns of the December 1999 national parliamentary election (national party-list vote) in that country. Among the issues investigated are spatial variations in voter turnout, the geographic concentration/dispersion of voter support by party, and correlations between that support and selected demographic and socioeconomic variables. Particular attention is focused on the extent to which voting patterns mirrored those of previous electoral contests and were affected by the appearance of such new electoral coalitions as Fatherland–All Russia, Unity, and the Union of Right Forces. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O50, Z10. 13 figures, 5 tables, 27 references.

Accident, agency, and liability in New Guinea Highlands compensation practices

In mid-1999 an issue arose in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea whose ramifications widely disrupted social and economic activities throughout the province and continued to do so for some months. The issue arose over whether to classify an event as an 'accident' or not. Dick Mune, a politician who had been ousted as governor of the province in the 1997 national parliamentary elections by Anderson Agiru, had challenged the validity of the election result. The Supreme Court was about to begin the process of deciding on his challenge, and Mr. Mune set out by car to travel to the town of Mt. Hagen in order to catch a plane for the capital city, Port Moresby, to attend the court hearing. On the drive to Mt. H?gen his vehicle left the road and tumbled over a hillside. Mr. Mune was a passenger in the car, and he jumped out to save himself but struck a rock and died from the blow. The driver of the vehicle survived and declared that the brakes had

Defensive Democratization in Jordan

Jordan's political-liberalization program, initiated in 1989, represents the longest sustained such opening in the Arab world today. During this time, Jordan has held three national parliamentary elections, enacted a number of liberalizing laws, removed many restrictions on the press, and minimized the role that the security services, ormukhābarāt, play in repressing opposition. Moreover, the liberalization program has survived a number of severe challenges, including the second Gulf War and the subsequent loss of Jordan's major regional trading partner, Iraq; the implementation of a difficult domestic austerity program; and the conclusion of a controversial peace treaty with Israel.

Timing of Vote Decision in First and Second Order Dutch Elections 1978–1995: Evidence from Artificial Neural Networks

A time series (t = 921) of weekly survey data on vote intentions in the Netherlands for the period 1978–1995 shows that the percentage of undecided voters follows a cyclical pattern over the election calendar. The otherwise substantial percentage of undecided voters decreases sharply in weeks leading up to an election and gradually increases afterwards. This article models the dynamics of this asymmetric electoral cycle using artificial neural networks, with the purpose of estimating when the undecided voters start making up their minds. We find that they begin to decide which party to vote for nine weeks before a first order national parliamentary election and one to four weeks before a second order election, depending on the type of election (European Parliament, Provincial States, City-councils). The effect of political campaigns and the implications for political analysis are discussed.

The geography of the 1990 Hungarian parliamentary elections

Abstract The changes in eastern and central Europe in 1989 and 1990 are pivotal in modern history. The emerging democratic systems in this region provide unique opportunities for the study of the geography of European-style national parliamentary elections in countries after a hiatus of over four decades. One of the best examples of the immediate emergence of a competitive multi-party electoral system in central and eastern Europe is Hungary. The 1989 Hungarian parliamentary election law calls for the election of a 386-member single-chamber parliament by way of both single-member districts and proportional allocation. Numerous political parties, groups, and independent candidates participated in the spring 1990 parliamentary elections. Ten electoral maps illustrate the significant geographical variation in both voter participation and political party support in these elections. The electoral maps serve as the centerpiece in an initial exploration of the geographical differences of the Hungarian electorate and in the possible explanations of the voting results. For example, voter turn-out was highest along the western border with Austria and in urban areas and lowest in rural eastern Hungary, especially along the border with the Soviet Union. This variation and the differences in political party support are partially explained not only by Hungary's geographical position, but also by its present human geography and a number of social-economic variables. In the end the largest party to emerge, the conservative, anti-Communist, nationalist, and populist Hungarian Democratic Forum, gained 43 percent of the total seats and formed a coalition government with two small center-right parties.